A few years ago, I wrote about a particular class of clean energy advocates who I described as “not anti-nuclear but.” The true face of the anti-nuclear movement, I argued, is not “hair-shirt wearing opponents of progress” but rather “a highly credentialed progressive policy wonk, a lawyer, or, academic, or journalist, who often claims not to be opposed to nuclear energy at all.”

Five years later, that cohort of barely disguised opponents has largely been defeated. Even NRDC now supports reopening shuttered nuclear reactors.

Instead, the biggest challenge the nuclear sector faces today, in my view, comes from within. The “pro-nuclear but” camp is genuinely pro-nuclear but typically argues for policy and technology that represent little change from the status quo that has been responsible for a generation of decline and stagnation—reactors that no one has been willing to build and regulations that have stifled innovation.

In the sections that follow, I run through five common “pro-nuclear but” claims: that advanced reactors are too exotic and unproven; that economies of scale mean that small modular reactors will never be cheaper than large reactors; that serious regulatory reform isn’t important and undermines safety and public confidence; that enriched fuels significantly increase proliferation risk; and, that doubling down on public engagement proceduralism is the key to assuring social license to build new reactors.

I’ve written about some of these claims in the past. They often overlap and there is a grain of truth in each of them. But each claim in one way or another mistakes highly contingent technological, economic, and political developments from the last century as intrinsic to nuclear energy and its future. Taken together, they reflect not a hard headed pragmatism about the technology but a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that risks dooming the sector to stagnation and obsolescence at a moment of unprecedented opportunity.

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Myth #1: The Paper Reactor Problem

If you’ve followed nuclear energy over the last 15 years or so, you have almost certainly come across Admiral Rickover’s famous observation about paper reactors:

An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:1) It is simple. 2) It is small. 3) It is cheap. 4) It is light. 5) It can be built very quickly. 6) It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”) 7) Very little development is required. 8) It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 9) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: 1) It is being built now. 2) It is behind schedule. 3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. 4) Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. 5) It is very expensive. 6) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. 7) It is large. 8) It is heavy. 9) It is complicated.

These days, the quotation is almost always used to raise skepticism about small, advanced reactors in contrast to proven technology, namely large light water reactors. But the characteristics that Rickover described don’t cleave nearly as neatly as people who invoke the quote imagine. The only reactors currently being built now in the United States are, in fact, small advanced reactors, two Kairos Hermes reactors in Tennessee and the TerraPower Natrium reactor in Wyoming, along with a half dozen or so demonstration reactors as part of the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program at Idaho National Laboratory. Several are behind schedule. All, as first-of-a-kind reactors, will be expensive.

First-of-a-kind small advanced reactors will surely face many of the problems that Rickover described above. Non-light water reactors had exactly these sorts of issues in the 60’s and 70’s when they were demonstrated by government laboratories and very occasionally commercialized. Sodium coolants leaked and caught fire. Steel alloys and other materials became embrittled by high neutron flux fast reactors. Corrosion, in particular, was a problem. First-of-a-kind commercial reactors were expensive to build and operate and were frequently down for repairs and maintenance. This history has been the foundation for much contemporary skepticism toward advanced reactors.

But these problems are, ironically, the characteristics in Rickover’s telling of practical reactors, not academic reactors. Back in the 60s and 70s, the US was building lots of conventional nuclear plants at competitive cost that featured proven technology and well developed supply chains, so there was little reason to push through the first of kind and supply chain challenges necessary to get non-light water reactors to market. But that is not the case today. A range of institutional and economic changes have made it far more difficult to build large light-water reactors at competitive costs in advanced developed economies. And there is ample reason to believe that fifty years of progress in materials science, computation, and design will help advanced reactor developers solve many of the problems that plagued early advanced reactor designs in the post-war era.

For at least the last five years, meanwhile, breathless reports that the next AP1000 build was imminent have come to naught, despite a Trump executive order calling for 10 new reactors under construction by 2030. Unable to convince domestic parties to take on the risk, the administration appears to be considering switching horses, dropping the AP1000 and acquiescing to using Korean or Japanese technologies and firms to get large reactor projects underway in the US.

So while it is true that the AP1000, thanks to the completion of two reactors in Georgia in 2024, are proven technology, there is very little reason to think, despite many proponents’ claims, that the next one will be built quickly or cheaply. Rather, it appears unlikely that any site, other than the unfinished AP1000 build that was abandoned in South Carolina in 2017, will begin construction before 2030.

Many boosters have also claimed that the next build might be as much as 30% cheaper than the Georgia plants. But recent estimates by both Duke Energy and TVA project that the next AP1000 build will cost more than the first two plants in Georgia. TVA projects that an AP1000 will cost the same as the first of four planned GE BWRX300 units, with subsequent builds seeing substantial further cost declines. Cheapest of all, in TVA’s analysis, is the Terrapower Natrium reactor which it projects will cost about two-thirds as much as an AP1000.

Besides the two plants at Vogtle, the only AP1000s ever completed are in China, which did so at costs that the West is unlikely to replicate and has since significantly changed the design for future builds. The much hyped Fermi project, which planned to build four AP1000s to power its President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus, is, as Robert Bryce wrote last week, imploding. With every day that passes since the completion of the Vogtle reactors in 2024, the AP1000 looks more like a paper reactor and less like a practical one.

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Myth #2: Economies of Scale Are the Coin of the Nuclear Realm

Back in the 60s and 70s, the size of light-water reactors increased from demonstration reactors that clocked in around 600MW, to 800MW commercial reactors, and then upwards of 1GW. Size, it turned out, really mattered for light-water reactors. As reactors got larger, the cost per MW to build and operate them declined, at least until the mid-70s, when rising commodity and labor costs, high interest rates, and overregulation saw nuclear costs escalate significantly. That’s because a 600MW reactor requires much the same infrastructure, security, and operating staff as a 1200MW reactor.

This basic dynamic should mostly apply to small light-water designs as well. For somewhat different reasons, both NuScale’s VOYGR reactor and GE’s BWRX300 reactor require substantially more concrete and steel per MW of capacity than an AP1000. Small light-water reactors also still require a significant exclusion zone, a well-staffed control room, and much the same infrastructure as a large light-water reactor.

But that assumption does not necessarily apply to many other reactor types. Given the larger safety margins and lower likelihood and consequences of worst case accidents, many small advanced designs can be much more lightly staffed or remotely operated. The exclusion zone is often the plant wall or the fence line. Security needs are less extensive and fewer moving parts and redundant safety systems mean much reduced maintenance, infrastructure, and staffing.

We won’t really know what these reactors will cost until some of these first-of-a-kind non-light water reactors are built. In contrast to light water reactor costs, which have a well established cost structure and significant data to base estimates of future costs upon, non-light water reactor costs, in both structure and particulars, are far less certain. A comprehensive literature review and engineering analysis led by Idaho National Laboratory concluded recently that while cost estimates for non-light water reactors were highly uncertain, the best estimates provide little basis for the claim that non-light water SMRs will cost more than conventional large light-water reactors.

And while it is true that all else equal, a larger reactor will generally cost less per MW to build and operate than a small reactor, all else is almost never equal. Whether light water or something else, large reactors have proven virtually impossible to build in liberalized electricity markets, which dominate in the US and most other developed economies. As Adam Stein and I noted in the fall of 2024, site availability, in the short and medium term, significantly limits opportunities to build large reactors in large enough numbers that we might get good at doing it again. Meanwhile, smaller reactors, simpler builds, and much reduced unit costs mean that economies of multiples, process innovation, manufacturing, and simplified supply chains have much greater potential to drive costs down for small, non-light water technologies.

I don’t write any of this to suggest that we should give up on the AP1000 or that economies of scale never matter. The AP1000 is a wondrous technology. It would be great if we could figure out how to get some more of them built in the US. But the logic of the small, advanced reactor appears, at the moment at least, to be winning the day in the real world. Billions of dollars in private investment have flowed into dozens of next generation startups, orders from hyperscalers, big tech, and industrial users are growing, and real “practical” reactors are actually under construction, suggesting that legacy light-water technology and large reactors may not, in fact, turn out to be the future of nuclear.

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Myth #3: Far Reaching Regulatory Reform Is Unnecessary, Compromises Safety, and Risks Public Confidence in Nuclear Energy.

If you’d been a fly on the wall as Congress was debating passage of the ADVANCE Act back in 2024, you would have heard a lot of erstwhile nuclear advocates insisting that a key provision directing the NRC to modernize its mission statement to account for the benefits of nuclear energy was at best a distraction and at worst would compromise nuclear safety.

Some said it publicly. Others privately. Yet, today, you will be hard pressed to find any nuclear advocate still skeptical of that change. Some have publicly reversed course. Others simply took credit for it after the fact.

That’s because barely a year after the NRC revised its mission statement, the impact of the reset is already clear. Congressionally mandated action to modernize NRC licensing for a new generation of reactors had dragged along without resolution for over five years prior to the agency’s mission statement revision. In the year since, the NRC has both finalized the Part 53 licensing framework mandated by Congress in 2019 and revised its entire regulatory code pursuant to Executive Order 14300. The NRC approved TerraPower’s construction permit, NuScale’s uprated license amendment, and Kairos Hermes 2 license ahead of schedule.

The new mission statement, alone, can’t take credit for this. President Trump replaced and then removed the former chair of the commission, issued Executive Order 14300, and used DOGE and other sources of executive power to force the NRC to move much faster on reform. The mission statement was part of a much broader culture shift that has ramified throughout the agency and far beyond.

But the dramatic change in the pace of rulemaking and license approvals is good evidence of just how conservative, arbitrary, and lacking in urgency much of the agency’s regulatory practices actually were. The memory-holing of all the arguments made against the mission statement requirements in the ADVANCE Act prior to its passage, meanwhile, suggest that there was never much basis to them in the first place.

And yet, many of the same parties are now making almost exactly the same arguments in opposition to current proposals to eliminate ALARA, abolish or significantly limit the use and misuse of LNT, raise maximum public radiation dose limits, and license demonstration reactors through DOE. As with mission modernization, these “pro-nuclear but” advocates claim that they are unnecessary because both conventional and advanced reactors are already able to meet the old standards. They say that raising regulatory thresholds increases the risk of accidents and that even if new rules and standards don’t materially increase public health risk, they will undermine public confidence in nuclear regulation.

I have written recently about these claims and won’t go into too much detail here. Suffice to say that as with the claims that were made about mission modernization, there is little by way of an actual mechanism that critics will stipulate for how these changes would lead to negative consequences. Raising the public radiological dose limit, for instance, from 100 millirem to 500 millirem, might seem to portend significant public health consequences until you realize that both doses are well over an order of magnitude below exposures at which an increase in cancer incidence could conceivably be observed.

The argument that changing these standards won’t matter because current and proposed reactors already meet more stringent standards, meanwhile, asserts, with little basis, that design decisions that have been informed by the current standards and regulatory norms would be the same under a different regulatory regime. As with claims about the technical issues and economics of scale that challenge small, advanced reactors, this argument is strongly anchored in the current regulatory and technological status quo, which tells us nothing about what future developers might do under different policies.

Finally, the chestnut that these changes risk undermining public confidence both misunderstands the nature of public opinion and is fundamentally incompatible with any sort of risk informed regulation. If public fear of radiation exposure is both highly irrational and irrationally high, after all, then all risk informing of regulation definitionally undermines public confidence. To the contrary, what has become clear over the last year, as regulatory reform has shifted from talking point to reality, is that it is possible to license and regulate nuclear energy far more flexibly and expeditiously without compromising safety or provoking a public outcry.

Myth #4: Advanced Reactors and Enriched Fuels Increase Proliferation Risk

If you are not deeply enmeshed in nuclear policy and technology, you might think that the distinction between low enriched uranium (LEU) and high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) is arcane. With regard to the importance of these different fuel types to different sorts of reactors, the distinction is anything but. Most advanced reactor technologies require the latter, which is typically enriched to just below 20% U235 content, versus LEU which is typically enriched to 4-6% and is sufficient to power conventional reactors.

But when it comes to proliferation risk, the distinction is indeed arcane and largely irrelevant. Neither 4% enriched uranium nor 20% enriched uranium is remotely sufficient to make a fissionable weapon. The case against HALEU is that it takes a lot less additional enrichment to turn 20% enriched uranium into weapons grade uranium with over 90% U235 content than it does to turn LEU into weapons grade material. But the key thing that determines whether you can make weapons grade material is not whether you start with LEU or HALEU but whether you have the enrichment capacity to make LEU in the first place. The process and technology for enriching a decent grade of uranium ore from 0.6% U235 to 4 or 6% is exactly the same as what is required to enrich LEU from 6% to 18 or 20% which is the same that is necessary to enrich HALEU from 20% to weapons grade at 90%. It’s just centrifuges, lots of them, spinning up the U235 concentration in the fuel.

Once you have sufficient enrichment capacity to increase the concentration of U235 from .06% in uranium ore to 6% in LEU, you already have all the enrichment capacity and technical capability you need to make weapons grade fuel. HALEU is just a step along that path, and not a particularly significant one. Time to breakout is somewhat shorter if you start with HALEU rather than LEU. But any actor that has stockpiled significant LEU has ample enrichment capacity to get from there to weapons grade material in short order.

What makes producing weapons grade uranium difficult is not procuring uranium ore or centrifuges but hiding the effort from prying international eyes. Sanctions, technology restrictions, and other disincentives to weapons proliferation make nuclear weapons development an unattractive enterprise for all but the most determined state actors. States that are determined to do so will generally, sooner or later, succeed. But the existence of civilian nuclear energy and enrichment capabilities is not correlated significantly with weapons development.

Nonetheless, it has been an article of faith within the non-proliferation community for decades that HALEU production ought to be discouraged, a posture that continues to this day. And while few proliferation experts today outright oppose HALEU reactors and fuel, the basic heuristic is that more enrichment capacity and more enriched fuels are bad even though, in many contexts, lower enriched fuels and technology can be faster and easier pathways to weapons grade material. LEU used in light water reactors, for instance, produces spent fuel with higher plutonium levels than HALEU in most advanced reactors. A CANDU reactor produces similar levels of plutonium from natural uranium with no enrichment at all.

Nonetheless, general preference within the non-proliferation community has been for large light-water reactors using LEU with a once-through fuel cycle that forgoes reprocessing. Once all the caveats and safeguards for HALEU fuel production and reactors that many non-proliferation experts insist upon are accounted for, there is little likelihood that HALEU-based technologies will prove scalable.

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Myth #5: Consent-Based Siting Holds the Key to Community Acceptance of Nuclear Facilities

For much of the last generation, the shadow of the failed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository has loomed over nuclear politics and policy. Nevada Senator Harry Reid’s long tenure as leader of Senate Democrats resulted in the issue dominating Democratic policy priorities at both the NRC and DOE. Opposition to Yucca, along with sustained fights to prevent the completion of the Shoreham plants in New York and Seabrook in New Hampshire, were taken as evidence that local NIMBY resistance was at the core of failed efforts to site and build nuclear facilities around the country.

In response to this diagnosis, the notion of consent-based siting has gained support among many nuclear advocates. If the problem is that nuclear plants and waste facilities are being forced upon communities that don’t want them, then the answer is to find communities that want them. Better yet, do even more community and public engagement before choosing sites, and offer lots of special, legally binding, community benefits, so more communities will want those facilities.

But while there is nothing wrong with consent based siting in theory, most proposed nuclear facilities actually have significant community consent. As Breakthrough’s Adam Stein recently wrote, in the case of proposed waste facilities, the communities where they have been proposed have strongly supported these facilities. Even Yucca Mountain had significant local support.

The opposition to these facilities, rather, typically comes from further afield. State officials, the city of Las Vegas (150 miles away), and national environmental groups were the main opponents of Yucca Mountain. Opposition to temporary waste storage facilities in Texas and New Mexico has been similarly composed.

The problem has not been local NIMBYs who don’t want these facilities in their communities but state officials whose incentives are more often to pander to larger constituencies in population centers that see no direct benefit from these facilities finding common cause with ideological opponents who often have little connection to the communities in question whatsoever. Recent proposals in this vein, such as the proposed Office of Public Engagement at the NRC, would almost assuredly make the situation worse, basically paying environmental justice and similar activist groups with little actual presence in local communities to show up and obstruct nuclear projects and demand community benefits that no one locally is asking for.

In reality, many communities are competing for new nuclear facilities. Four towns in Wyoming all campaigned to be the site of the first TerraPower reactor. As Stein notes, the Department of Energy’s proposed Innovation Hub approach, which packages long-term waste storage with reprocessing, advanced reactor demonstration, and other opportunities that position these hubs as centers for innovation around cutting edge energy technologies has potentially flipped the script. Twenty-eight states have indicated interest in hosting hubs. Combining local and state incentives, and supporting local communities that want them, has far greater potential to build broad stakeholder support for nuclear facilities than pouring more public engagement resources into communities that have not been the source of resistance to those facilities and typically have wanted them.

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Nuclear for the 21st Century

As I noted at the beginning of this post, none of these claims are necessarily wrong. It is possible that non-light water reactor technology will prove as difficult to tame as it was fifty years ago. If that proves to be the case, large reactors may well continue to be the nuclear technology of choice, regulatory reform to allow for different technological pathways and innovation will be less essential, there will be little need for HALEU fuels, and the number and diversity of siting contexts and use cases for new nuclear infrastructure will be greatly simplified. But the applicability of each of these erstwhile conditions and constraints to the future of nuclear energy is every bit as contingent as the histories from which they are drawn.

And while I don’t doubt the sincerity of many who make these claims, there are other reasons why so much of the nuclear advocacy community continues to fight the last century’s wars. For a lot of nuclear insiders, the nuclear they know is the basis of their expertise and status within the community. For many generalists without deep knowledge of either the technology or its history, the “pro-nuclear but” posture is a way to signal that they are serious people, not wild-eyed “nuclear bros”. And for a lot of left-of-center nuclear advocates, “pro-nuclear but” helps resolve the cognitive dissonance between their (not unreasonable) conviction that “the Orange Man is bad” and the reality that the Trump administration has proven far more effective at accelerating nuclear innovation, regulatory reform, and commercialization than Biden-era Democrats.

At a moment when power demand, AI economics, global energy supply shocks, climate concerns, and a huge shift in public opinion about nuclear have created possibilities for the technology that have not existed since the dawn of the nuclear era, the effort to downselect nuclear’s future to a post-industrial simulacrum of its 20th century past has real policy consequences.

In order to convince utilities and state regulators to sign up for new large reactors, for instance, legislation is now proposed to establish federal cost-overrun insurance, which seems as likely to incentivize cost overruns as spark a renaissance in large light water reactors. The NRC’s regulatory reform efforts, to take another example, have stopped short of establishing a clear and consistent numerical standard for reactor safety in the face of criticism from various “pro-nuclear but” quarters.

Much of the nuclear advocacy community, meanwhile, has failed to substantively engage the NRC as it has embarked upon a soup to nuts revision of its entire regulatory code. Licensing barriers and ambivalence at the Department of Energy has delayed congressionally mandated establishment of a HALEU fuel bank. And while climate and clean tech philanthropy has underwritten much of the academic discussion around consent-based siting, there has been little support for state based nuclear advocates, the kind of people who might actually show up at a local meeting to support a proposed nuclear project.

To be clear, there is much to be said for leaning into strategies that have worked in the past. But that heuristic doesn’t offer much guidance for nuclear energy. The assumptions, norms, institutions, practices, and technologies that characterized the sector over the last fifty years bear significant responsibility for its decline. That’s why the civil society pro-nuclear movement that has so transformed the political and policy landscape around nuclear energy over the last fifteen years had to be launched by outsiders who were willing to question those assumptions and norms. As that effort gained momentum, it was too often captured by the old nuclear priesthood and its many conventional wisdoms. A better future for nuclear energy will almost certainly require something different.

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As the last major effort for bipartisan permitting reform fizzled out at the end of the last Congress, both protagonists and observers settled upon two dueling explanations for the political failure of the Energy Permitting and Reform Act (EPRA). The first was that the green groups did the deed, opposing judicial reform and other key changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that spiked a deal with Republicans. The second was that the utility industry was responsible, opposing reforms that would have made it easier for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to override state opposition to new interstate transmission lines because they feared that new transmission would increase competition from out of state generators.

The first of these explanations is undoubtedly true. Green groups made no bones about their opposition to the package pushed by then West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Wyoming’s John Barrasso. Despite a lot of handwaving in some green quarters about the need to build, not a single major green group came out publicly in support of EPRA.

But the role that utilities played is more complicated. Not every major utility opposed EPRA and some publicly supported it. Rural electricity co-ops and publicly owned utilities opposed the transmission reform provisions in EPRA as did a subset of investor-owned, vertically integrated monopoly utilities in states that have not liberalized their electricity markets.

The dispute, ostensibly, was about whether states should be forced to pay for transmission capacity that they don’t want or need. But it was also about an attempt to use transmission reform as a trojan horse to force states where utilities continue to be traditionally structured and regulated to allow competition from merchant power generators.

As Democrats and Republicans gear up for one more go at a permitting reform deal, there are lessons from the failed effort to pass EPRA in the dying days of the last Congress that might help avert a similar fate in this Congress. Transmission reform needs to work not only for utilities and states that have liberalized their electricity markets but also for those that have not. For decades, advocates for electricity market liberalization have argued that competition would lower rates and accelerate decarbonization. But the real world evidence for these benefits is mixed at best. Simultaneously, the ability of traditionally regulated utilities and regulators to plan for new generation, transmission, and distribution has real strengths that advocates for market competition have underestimated. Using transmission reform to force competition on states that have not signed up for liberalization is bad politics and bad policy.

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Electricity Market Liberalization Has Been a Mixed Bag

Both renewable energy advocates and proponents of electricity market competition have long directed fire at traditional cost-of-service utilities, both believing that supply-side competition will drive down electricity prices by opening up the grid to alternative energy sources. Vertically integrated utilities, in this view, restrict the free market’s ability to lower prices and bring new energy technology to market. There is some truth to this argument. Data collected since restructuring in the 1990s shows that competition in deregulated markets does indeed improve dispatch and decrease production costs.

But the relationship between wholesale electricity market competition and lower observed electricity rates is tenuous. Lower production costs don’t necessarily lower consumer prices because electricity markets remain deeply imperfect. Generators can exert market power, markets are influenced by state policies, and public goods like reliability and grid inertia aren’t properly valued, even by capacity and ancillary markets. Multiple analyses of deregulated regions suggest that dispatch of cheaper generation doesn’t even translate into lower wholesale price, much less retail prices.

Production costs, moreover, are just a fraction of the prices seen by end users. In an analysis of utility spending reports to FERC, EIA found that, while production costs nationwide decreased 24% from 2003 to 2023, spending on transmission tripled and spending on distribution grew 160%. EIA goes so far as to explicitly state that “capital spending on the distribution system, responsible for delivering electricity to end users, was the main driver of electricity spending increases over the last two decades.”

In practice, the choice between competitive markets and cost-of-service regulation has real tradeoffs. For instance, deregulated markets tend to beget volatility. Prices subject to real-time swings in supply and demand expose consumers to the volatility of fuel prices and supply-demand imbalances. The cost-of-service model doesn’t eliminate these impacts entirely, but helps smooth them out over a longer time horizon, protecting ratepayers from feeling price spikes as acutely.

If one regulatory model were objectively better than the other, it would demonstrate so on the grounds of a utility’s core mandate: to provide reliable electricity at the least cost possible to consumers. Yet deregulation has not emerged as a clear winner.

Consider resource adequacy. Deregulated regions internalize resource adequacy with market structures like ancillary and capacity markets that offer profits to private developers willing to build generation needed for long-term resource adequacy. But resource adequacy, and reliability more broadly, are public goods that can’t be bought and sold in any organic market. Because of this, electricity markets struggle with proper valuation. Markets are also influenced by inconsistent risk tolerances between regions and states, distortionary political interventions (e.g., renewable portfolio standards and state tax credits), and regulations that cap energy prices during periods of extreme scarcity (e.g., Texas electricity prices hitting the state’s $9/kWh cap during Winter Storm Uri). On net, merchant developers in competitive markets typically wait to start new construction until they see strong enough price signals. This often leaves deregulated regions with thinner margins of excess capacity to act as a buffer against, say, an unanticipated explosion of demand from data centers.

Regulated utilities can tackle resource adequacy with the advantages of centralized decision making, stable financing, and predictable revenue. As both the system planner and the system builder, they don’t experience a coordination gap between the identification of a need and that need getting fulfilled. This lets regulated utilities construct larger projects that serve long-term resource adequacy forecasts rather than limiting new construction to what near-term market signals justify.

As a result, vertically integrated utilities are structurally better equipped to accommodate large loads like data centers and industrial facilities and to build energy megaprojects like nuclear, hydropower, and even offshore wind. Market liberalization has proven deadly for both firm, low carbon generation and large loads. Since restructuring began, liberalized markets have contributed to the closure of 6.5 GW of nuclear generation. The replacement of long-term industrial price agreements has contributed to the closure of 85% of U.S. aluminum smelting capacity since 1980. No liberalized market in the US or abroad has succeeded in deploying a new reactor or smelter. Ever.

Critics will point out that guaranteed rates of return on billion dollar megaprojects incentivizes utilities to overrun costs. Again, this argument is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Yes, the cost-of-service model puts the risk of overbuild onto ratepayers. But liberalized markets burden ratepayers with risk too; they only shift it to the opposite scenario by imposing steep scarcity prices if past market signals caused underbuilding.

Is it better to bill ratepayers for larger safety margins, knowing that utility gold-plating makes up at least some of those costs, or to use markets to ensure, on average, leaner spending on generation but increase household electricity prices at the times when that conservatism falls short? The case for the latter is by no means clear enough to justify fixating on competition and deregulation, a stance that only works to the country’s collective detriment at a time when bulk system reliability demands collaboration and coordination over homogeneity.

Figure 1: Conceptual table of societal risk burdens under cost-of-service versus competitive electricity market structures

At any rate, using transmission reform to increase competition in regulated markets in the name of affordability, reliability, and decarbonization fails to reckon with how deregulated markets have yet to deliver on their promises.

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Decoupling Transmission Reform from Stealth Deregulation

Unfortunately, proposed federal transmission reforms of the past few years have indeed erred towards the deregulatory thesis—directly and circumspectly proposing increases in federal authorities to promulgate competition.

The Energy Bills Relief Act introduced by Reps. Levin and Casten in March 2026, for example, would mandate minimum electrical transfer capacity between regions, give FERC ultimate authority to allocate the costs for a broad and vague classification of transmission lines of “national significance,” and require that demand response be “eligible to participate in all wholesale energy markets regardless of the State in which they are located.” Physical ties to neighboring deregulated regions exposes regulated utilities to the argument that lower cost imports should displace new local investment. While this would not definitively lead to deregulation, it allows ratepayer advocates to make the case to state commissions that utilities should trade with external generators and integrate with competitive markets in lieu of investing in local generation and infrastructure. Integration and interconnection may make sense in some cases, but those determinations need to be made in the context of comprehensive, long-term planning. Moreover, statutes like these in the Energy Bills Relief Act make no attempt to integrate with regional processes or the limits placed on FERC jurisdiction by the Federal Power Act, nor do they ensure ratepayers on one side of a line won’t pay for benefits received only on the other.

The press release announcing the Energy Bills Relief Act—and the bill title itself—frame these policies around lowering electricity prices. But it wasn’t too long ago that policymakers openly pushed for similar reforms to advance the interests of competitive electricity markets and renewables into cost-of-service regions. The CHARGE Act of 2022 mandated competitive procurement and eliminated right of first refusal laws for new generation built outside of an RTO or ISO, with sections titled “Promoting Competition for Generation” and “Due Regard for Fair Competition.” The 2023 SITE Act proposed allowing FERC to pre-empt state legislatures for interstate transmission lines that “enable the use of renewable energy,” while the 2025 Reinforcing the Grid Against Extreme Weather Act called on FERC to consider “improved access to electricity generating facilities with no direct emissions of greenhouse gases” and “increased competition and market liquidity in electricity markets” as transmission benefits to determine minimum mandatory interregional transfer capacities.

EPRA, to its credit, steers clear of many of these excesses, shedding the unambiguous use of deregulatory and renewables-biased language seen in its predecessor bills. But traces of that approach still exist. EPRA, for instance, would allow FERC to issue siting permits for interstate transmission at or above 100 kV. This change makes much needed improvements to the existing federal siting pathway that bureaucratic redundancies and legal challenges have made nearly impossible to use. And while the 100 kV provision does constrain FERC’s siting authority compared to the status quo (the existing authority has no such voltage floor), the very act of making the siting pathway usable nets an increase in federal powers well above the floor at which they would likely be particularly efficient or practical. Half of the country’s transmission lines are at or over 100 kV [Figure 1]. 100 kV transmission is significantly more expensive per unit capacity than higher voltage lines [Figure 2]. Raising the voltage floor to, say, 230 kV, would reserve federal authority for projects that clearly exploit transmission’s high economies of scale and promote more efficient utility spending. Democrats genuinely interested in interregional transmission should be prepared to concede points like a 100 kV limiter for the greater good of the permitting package, which almost certainly provides more benefit for transmission than extending federal siting authority to thousands of lines at the lowest possible voltages to be considered part of the bulk power system.

Figure 2: Number of transmission lines in the United States by voltage class. Approximately 52% (44,665) of lines with documented voltage levels are rated between 100 and 161 kV.

Figure 3: Cost per MW-mile (rated capacity) for a new AC, single-circuit transmission line at different voltage levels. Assumes a 100 mile line, addition of two breaker-and-a-half positions (one each terminal), power factor of 0.95, and conductor specs provided in MISO’s 2024 transmission cost estimation guide. Calculated data may not be accurate outside of the MISO footprint.

Bottom line, rather than assuming that interregional lines maximize social welfare, federal policies should instead facilitate interregional planning processes that use local cost-benefit analyses to evaluate projects on their merits. States, utilities, and other stakeholders are far more likely to support federal transmission policies that let them participate in planning from the outset and that align with existing FERC rules. Even if interregional planning is federally required, it retains local autonomy, making it significantly more palatable than top-down, prescriptive transmission mandates.

It is also crucial that interregional transmission planning operate in parallel with both region’s internal transmission plans, and that these joint transmission plans use objective criteria that regions agree upon a priori to calculate a project’s benefits. This builds upon interregional planning provisions in EPRA that require consideration of existing regional transmission plans but don’t ensure that interregional lines are directly evaluated as alternatives to multiple regional projects. Such criteria should consider both the least and most cost-efficient solutions across the shared geographic area that improve bulk system performance defined using quantifiable metrics already employed by the power sector. Importantly, such criteria should exclude more politically-laden criteria like promotion of clean energy, regional carbon emissions, and other vague benefits. After all, one state should not have to pay higher rates to help another state meet its clean energy policy targets. If climate advocates believe so firmly in the growing economic power of clean energy sources, they should take appropriate confidence that such characteristics will manifest empirically in cost-optimized reliability planning.

If interregional planning selects an interregional line as a worthy project, it stands to reason that the affected states and entities should cooperate to build and pay for them. To prevent intractable disagreements over the exact share of costs that each involved state’s ratepayers should bear, federal policy should also require in advance that states formalize agreements on a default cost allocation formula to pay for a project in the event that it meets cost-benefit criteria. Here again, the early involvement of key decisionmakers improves this transmission reform framework’s political viability by letting them craft the agreements that will hold them accountable moving forward.

FERC siting authority should only apply in cases where states refuse to issue siting permits as a veto to block transmission projects that regional planning or rigorous independent analysis has already singled out as desirable for the areas they would connect. In such instances, FERC is only intervening to enforce agreements that the relevant stakeholders have already consented to—to advance a public interest that project-specific modeling has already empirically identified. Notably absent from this framework is any ideological attempt to impose competition upon vertically-integrated utility territories for its own sake.

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Market Neutral National Transmission Policy Is Good

In the end energy system evolution and decarbonization will have to move forward in numerous vertically-integrated, regulated jurisdictions as well as in deregulated electricity markets, federal organizations like the Tennessee Valley Authority or Bonneville Power Administration, and not-for-profit, community-owned utilities. Of these options, many states will choose to retain regulated monopolies in the electricity sector and have every right to do so.

Regions with competitive electricity markets are not going anywhere either. It is difficult to imagine putting Humpty-Dumpty back together, nationalizing all generation and transmission assets, and re-bundling everything under one roof again in places like New England, California, and Texas.

The United States, being a large and diverse country with strong regional and state-based identities, contains a myriad of regulatory flavors and will likely continue to do so. In a federal system, Congress should be expected to craft transmission policy reforms that let a thousand flowers bloom, rather than implicitly dictating one electricity market structure over another. If Congress and energy policy commentators want to build lines connecting wind and solar in the Great Plains to coastal population hubs or to restructure utility regulation in states that currently operate under the traditional cost of service monopoly utility model, they should debate such ideas explicitly rather than using transmission to fight a proxy war over competition and renewable energy despite the lack of clear evidence that these objectives efficiently improve affordability and reliability or accelerate decarbonization.

Meaningful and politically-durable transmission reform, rather, need only ensure that transmission planning regions coordinate to identify—and build—projects that genuinely benefit both regions, and to codify agreements between states for sharing project costs. Such a framework rightly leaves decisions over preferred utility or market structures up to regions and states, retaining federal siting authorities but only for transmission lines that participatory interregional planning has already identified as beneficial to all parties involved.

Even if critics of traditional monopoly utilities are correct that such territories would continue to block interconnections that might introduce competing sources of electricity generation, a compromise would still facilitate interregional transmission between other areas of the country—a vast improvement from the currently intractable status quo. At the same time, the empirically-grounded regional planning processes mandated by this policy framework would focus greater political pressure upon bad-faith stakeholders if they were indeed seeking to prevent worthy projects from moving forward.

By the same token, if utilities operating under cost-of-service regulation are correct that their regional systems are cost-efficient, resilient, and in conformity with reliability requirements, then the regional planning process will vindicate their claims and deem additional interconnections unnecessary. If they are mistaken, then they possess an obligation to their regulators and their ratepayers to support new high-voltage lines identified as beneficial.

Just as grid operators and researchers rely on centrally-designed power system models to test scenarios and hypotheses, the solution to regionally contested transmission expansion is to evaluate results scientifically: 30 years of observations from the American Experiment with reconstruction fail to corroborate the hypothesis that competitive markets are more effective than cost-of-service regulation. Policymakers should adopt this narrow and more technically-informed mindset to decouple the transmission debate from fraught ideological goals around preferred market models and favored generation technologies, increasing the odds that Congress will enact politically durable and materially successful permitting and transmission reforms.

This article has been revised in order to clarify language and discussion points regarding several policies and regulations.

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This month, the Breakthrough Institute, with support from the law firm Van Ness Feldman, filed an amicus brief in Lighthiser v. Trump, a suit brought by the climate activist organization Our Children’s Trust (OCT) against the Trump administration’s executive orders on “unleashing fossil fuels.” In our brief, we argue the Ninth Circuit Court should not only affirm the suit’s previous dismissal by the Montana District Court but reject OCT’s claims on substantive as well as procedural grounds.

Breakthrough has long supported action to address climate change and to accelerate the deployment of clean energy technology. So why have we elected to file an amicus brief challenging a lawsuit brought by climate advocates that will almost certainly be rejected by the court anyway?

First, because the case tests a series of claims that the climate movement has persistently made that simply misrepresent the facts. The plaintiffs claim that the Trump administration’s EOs will appreciably increase US greenhouse gas emissions, that this increase in emissions will appreciably increase atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and global temperatures, and that this increase in global temperatures will appreciably intensify weather extremes and other climate impacts that will cause additional harm to the the public. Every step in this logic chain is dubious.

The court room, as opposed to the court of public opinion, requires a much higher standard for both evidence and argument. Wise climate and energy policy, whether pursued through the judicial, legislative, or executive branches, requires some basic fidelity to both climate science and techno-economic reality. This is as true for the climate movement as it is for the Trump administration.

Second, because this suit reveals a strong anti-democratic strain of thought and action that is apparent in the broader strategy that OCT and other climate litigants are pursuing through the courts and is endemic to the climate movement more generally. OCT asks the courts to invent a new constitutional right from whole cloth—a right to a “stable climate” and “livable future”—to overturn policy undertaken by democratically elected policymakers based upon this newfangled constitutional principle, and to require a rapid transition away from fossil fuels by judicial fiat.

Neither concern about climate change nor antipathy toward the Trump administration’s energy dominance agenda and climate skepticism can justify these demands. Rightly or wrongly, there is no right to a livable climate in the Constitution. Climate change is a serious problem but there is no good evidence that climate change, now or in the foreseeable future, threatens a livable climate. Nor is there any well established science that can establish prospectively that Trump administration policies will significantly increase emissions or that an extremely marginal additional contribution to warming that these policies might cause would result in any measurable intensification of climate extremes or impacts.

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Energy Forecasts Are Hard, Even About the Near Future

As in prior cases such as Juliana v. United States, lower courts have often dismissed suits like Lighthiser on procedural grounds while largely accepting the plaintiffs’ scientific claims at face value. For this reason, a closer legal examination is overdue.

To establish its claim against the Trump administration, Lighthiser elevates factors that are, at best, minor contributors to the trajectory of emissions, warming, and climate impacts, presenting them instead as dominant drivers. This synecdoche is necessary to sustain the lawsuit’s central claim: that Trump administration policies will increase emissions, accelerate warming, and harm the plaintiffs.

To support this argument, the plaintiffs rely on modeling by Princeton energy systems scholar and our former colleague Jesse Jenkins, projecting that Trump’s executive actions will increase U.S. emissions. Jenkins is an accomplished researcher, but also a prominent climate advocate and architect of Biden-era climate policy. After passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), he published widely cited projections suggesting the law and related policies would reduce U.S. emissions by 37–41% by 2030 and 43–48% by 2035, with battery electric vehicles exceeding 80% of new light-duty vehicle sales and zero-carbon electricity reaching roughly 90% by 2035.

Soon after the law’s passage, however, Jenkins acknowledged that roughly 80% of those modeled emissions reductions depended on a massive expansion of high-voltage transmission infrastructure. Subsequent work from his laboratory found wind and solar deployment lagging earlier forecasts. In 2022, REPEAT modeling projected roughly 50 gigawatts of solar, 40 gigawatts of wind, and EVs reaching 20% of the new-vehicle market by 2025. Actual figures were closer to 43 gigawatts, 7 gigawatts, and 9%, respectively. Much of this divergence predates Trump’s re-election.

Jenkins has since produced new analyses estimating that Trump policies could add more than 500 million tons of CO2 by 2035. But as with his earlier projections, these analyses depend on highly uncertain assumptions about technology, markets, geopolitics, and policy effectiveness.

Like a lot of advocacy-oriented modeling, Jenkins’ models have been prone to overemphasize the impact of the policies they are aiming to shape.

While it is certainly plausible that U.S. emissions could be somewhat higher over the next decade under Trump than they would have been under a hypothetical Harris administration, the inverse is just as easily possible. The AI and data center boom would almost certainly have driven the deployment of significant new fossil generation under a Harris administration, just as they are under the Trump administration. Trump’s military adventure in Iran, meanwhile, is driving up energy prices to a degree that would have been unlikely under Harris, creating better market conditions for wind, solar, nuclear, and other non-fossil energy sources.

Even the explicit energy policy comparison is not so clearcut. Over the long term, the Trump administration’s conspicuously efficacious nuclear innovation agenda, and perhaps a bipartisan deal on permitting reform that eluded the Biden administration, may prove every bit as important, if not more so, than the Biden-era policies that the Trump administration and Republican Congress have revoked.

Jenkins at least grounds his analyses in a realistic understanding of energy technologies and their costs. Elsewhere, Lighthiser relies upon far more dubious energy researchers and analysis. In his own declaration submitted by the plaintiffs, Stanford’s Mark Jacobson writes that “the United States no longer needs fossil fuels for its energy purposes and has not for some time.” Jacobson’s discredited claims, along with a heavy reliance on the reductive and misleading levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) metric in Joseph Stiglitz’s and Geoffrey Heal’s respective briefs, are called upon to support the notion that the U.S. energy system could be immediately and easily transitioned to non-fossil technologies. This is far outside mainstream consensus in energy systems and technology analysis, and should be understood as such by the courts.

Forecasts, of course, are hard, especially about the future. As we and others have consistently noted over the last decade, there is little evidence that climate policy has had much impact on decarbonization rates over the long term. Emissions have often fallen faster under Republican administrations than Democratic ones, including during Trump’s first term. That’s because long-term decarbonization trends have historically been driven by macroeconomic forces and technological change, not climate policy. Both are influenced in various ways by policy. But mostly not the sorts of policy that the climate movement, Lighthiser, and Jenkins’ models seek to center in the climate discourse, policy debates, and litigation.

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Misrepresenting Climate Science In Service of Vexatious Litigation

Even accepting Jenkins’ estimates, it is hard to establish that Trump Administration policies will have much impact on global warming. Jenkins estimates that those policies will increase U.S. emissions by about 505 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year by 2035. That is roughly 10% of current U.S. emissions, less than 1% of current global emissions, and about 0.02% of total historic global emissions—the latter being the emissions factor that actually determines the amount of anthropogenic warming that the world experiences at any given point in time.

Lighthiser insists that “every ton of CO2 emitted contributes to global warming and climate change and increases the exposure of Plaintiffs to more harms now and additional harms in the future.” But the additional emissions that Jenkins estimates translate to an increase of between 0.0001°C and 0.0003°C in global temperatures. Even if that increase in annual U.S. emissions were to persist for a century, it would only translate to between 0.01 and 0.03 degrees of additional warming. This is the actual amount of additional warming, never explicitly stated, that the plaintiffs attribute to Trump Administration policy and claim is “unleashing dangers upon Plaintiffs” and is “a constitutional injury to Plaintiffs’ Fifth Amendment rights to life and liberty, their pursuit of happiness.”

Lighthiser alleges that a raft of harms identified by the plaintiffs—everything from direct injuries caused by natural disasters to asthma caused by wildfire smoke to a lack of skiing opportunities caused by melting snow—are directly attributable to executive branch policies. But even harms that can in some part be attributed to climate change, such as public health impacts caused by excessive heat, cannot be credibly traced to any one policy, corporation, industry, government, or nation. As we write in the brief, “Appellants’ causation theory fails to account for the inherently multifactorial nature of climate risk and collapses complex causal chains into untenable simplifications.”

In the clearest cases, such as heat waves and extreme precipitation events, anthropogenic warming can be confidently said to have modestly intensified climate hazards that would have been extreme anyway. Natural variability remains the primary driver of all extreme climatic activity. For many extreme climatic phenomena, there is no clear anthropogenic warming signal at all.

Yet the youth plaintiffs in Lighthiser cite extreme heat, flooding, drought, wildfire-induced smoke, and precipitation as the source of their injuries, such as the claim that plaintiffs will “face increasing extreme weather events, including hurricanes and tropical cyclones due to increased fossil fuel pollution.” Plaintiffs frequently link their injuries to specific extreme weather events and natural disasters, such as Hurricane Helene and the 2023 wildfires in Maui.

In Lighthiser, as in Juliana and dozens of other climate lawsuits at the federal, state, and local level, the plaintiffs ask the courts to find that tortious harm results from policies or actions responsible for a small fraction of annual global emissions, which in turn is responsible for a small share of total anthropogenic warming, which in turn can account for an at most marginal intensification of some extreme climatic phenomena, which in turn are not the main driver of social costs associated with climatic phenomena.

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An Anti-Democratic End Run

While Lighthiser can be easily dismissed as an absurdist parody of an actionable legal theory, it is also a microcosm of sorts of the fundamental strategy pursued by the climate movement. The climate movement is, at bottom, minoritarian. Having failed to mobilize either sufficient public demand or a crosscutting political coalition for sweeping climate action, the movement has sought to leverage its factional position within the Democratic Party, executive action, and the courts to achieve its desired ends instead.

Public concern about climate change is real and durable. All else equal, and as long as it doesn’t cost them any money, significant majorities of the public support climate action. But therein lies the rub. There is little public appetite to pay more for energy or other goods in order to cut emissions. Making polluters pay for the social cost of climate change sounds great until people realize that they are the polluters. The continual insistence that public resistance to the movement’s agenda is due to fossil fuel disinformation, the renewable energy boosterism, and claims that rapid reductions in emissions will save money are all forms of self-justifying cope downstream from this reality.

Unsurprisingly, then, the climate movement has attempted to end-run democratic governance, and instead pursue its unpopular and implausible agenda through executive action and the courts. Lest anyone doubt that this effort extends far beyond the Trump administration’s own assaults upon climate science, common sense, and practical energy policy, it is important to remember that OCT brought a similar suit against the Biden administration, seeking to invalidate all American energy policy, on the grounds that such policies have failed to keep atmospheric carbon emissions under 350 ppm. OCT has brought similar suits in all 50 states, and other climate advocates and attorneys general have brought over 1000 climate liability suits against corporate emitters and state and local governments.

That this effort is almost certain to fail is really beside the point. A movement underwritten by well-heeled environmental philanthropies, and no less dependent upon billionaires than its opposition, endeavors to substitute rule by ideologically motivated experts for deliberative, democratic policy-making. In so doing, OCT and its climate movement clients reveal themselves, perverting both science and democracy in pursuit of the movement’s millenarian agenda. The effort does not defend the Constitution but is, rather, antithetical to America’s founding principles.

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The Breakthrough Institute’s amicus brief in Lighthiser v. Trump, authored in collaboration with and filed by Charlene Koski of the law firm Van Ness Feldman, is available below.

Read the Brief Here

If you want to know why progress on nuclear energy was so halting during the Biden years, despite the administration’s support for the technology, Katy Huff’s recent Scientific American essay is as good a guide as any. Huff was Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy during the Biden Administration and is a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Illinois. Her essay takes aim at President Trump’s executive order last May directing the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reconsider the use of the controversial Linear No Threshold (LNT) radiological health model to set standards for public and occupational exposure to radiation.

LNT is the primary dose-response model that regulators use to determine how much allowable radiation exposure is acceptable from nuclear energy, nuclear medicine, and many other applications that involve some necessary or potential risk of radiation exposure. It is controversial because it assumes that the relationship between exposure to high doses of ionizing radiation and cancer incidence, which is well established, can be extrapolated to cancer risk at very low doses, which is unproven.

Pursuant to last year’s executive orders, a number of outlets reported in January that DOE was abandoning the ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) standard, the long-standing regulatory approach to limiting low dose exposure to radiation that requires additional measures to reduce potential exposure whenever possible, even when the dose is already extremely low. DOE is also expected to raise the maximum annual dose of radiation that the public can be exposed to as part of its New Reactor Pilot Program at Idaho National Laboratory, although those standards have not yet been formally released. This month, the NRC may endorse those standards as part of a sweeping revamp of its rules and regulations.

With those latter rule changes pending, Huff has published a scathing critique of the reset, arguing that in the absence of new research proving that there are no negative health effects at low doses, and extensive public input into any proposed new standard, changing the NRC’s health standards “effectively demands that NRC’s decision-making be political rather than scientific” and is hence “unethical.”

Huff insists that she is defending science over politics. But her position is, in fact, no less political than that of the Trump administration and far more extreme. She argues for a strict precautionary approach to radiological health risk while insisting that any change to this approach requires new research to falsify a hypothesis (LNT) that is both unproven and likely unfalsifiable. Meanwhile, she obfuscates the actual consequences of changes to public dose standards, which are minimal even accepting the LNT hypothesis, and claims, without evidence, that doing so will result in the loss of public confidence in nuclear energy.

Each of these claims is dubious, reflecting long-standing norms that have informed nuclear policy-making and regulation. Taken together, those norms have not only hampered nuclear energy but have likely also resulted in significantly higher overall public health burden from America’s energy system, rather than reducing it. The current reconsideration of LNT-based regulations for low dose exposure to radiation and ALARA are long overdue.

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A Tale of Two Backgrounds

At the crux of the controversy around the LNT model are two biophysical factors that confound efforts to establish an epidemiological relationship between exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation and negative health effects. The first is that humans are constantly being exposed to significant population-level radiation: from the sun, other natural sources such as radon, and anthropogenic sources such as X-rays and CT scans. Cumulatively, these sources of radiation exposure substantially exceed the doses that both the public and workers in the nuclear industry are exposed to from normal operations of nuclear plants and even from many potential accidents in which radiological material might escape containment.

The second biophysical factor is that the background rate of cancer incidence and mortality in all human populations is high. In rich countries where most people survive childhood diseases, infections, food borne illnesses, and other traumas and maladies that historically accounted for a large share of human mortality, about 40% of the population will get some form of cancer over the course of their lifetime and about 20% will ultimately die from it. Most cancer incidence is attributable to lifestyle, genetic factors, and random mutations as cells reproduce. A small percentage of cancers are caused by environmental pollutants of any sort. An even smaller percentage of that small percentage could conceivably be caused by exposure to radiation emanating from nuclear reactors.

Together, these two background factors massively confound any effort to reliably estimate what effect exposure to low doses of radiation has on public health. Everybody is exposed to background radiation that is significantly higher than low dose exposures that they might be exposed to from nuclear reactors. And large numbers of people will die from cancers caused by other factors. As a result, even when tracking very large populations exposed to low doses of radiation over a very long time period, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to identify a statistically significant increase in cancer incidence or mortality above the background rate experienced by populations that have not been exposed to excess low dose radiation.

Huff argues that more research is required before negative health effects from low dose exposures can be ruled out, arguing for a proposed National Academy study to attempt to resolve the question. But as Breakthrough’s Adam Stein and PJ Seel note in a recent Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article, there is little reason to think that more research of this sort is likely to resolve basic epidemiological questions.

So Huff is arguing a double standard, insisting that the current health standards are justified by this uncertainty but that changing them requires certainty in the form of new research proving a negative—that no health effects exist from low dose exposures that can’t actually be observed epidemiologically. Huff claims that this position is scientific, not political. But that claim is plainly absurd. Science simply can’t resolve the uncertainty about radiological health effects at low dose exposures. The decision to regulate low dose effects that are unavoidably speculative is no less political than the decision not to do so. Huff prefers a more precautionary approach than the Trump administration. But that is a conflict over social and political values, not science.

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Low Doses, Low Stakes

One of the ironies about the “angels on a pinhead” debate about LNT’s validity at low doses is that even granting that LNT is valid, the public health stakes associated with low dose exposures that might conceivably result from either nuclear operations or most plausible accident scenarios are very low.

Imagine two representative samples of 10,000 Americans, a control group that is not exposed to any additional radiation from nuclear energy and a test group that is exposed to an acute dose of 100 millisieverts (mSv), the threshold below which it is likely impossible to detect any statistically significant increase in cancer incidence or mortality from radiation exposure. In the control group, which has not been exposed to any additional radiation, we would expect around 4000 people to contract cancer at some point in their lifetime and about 2000 people to die from it. Among the test group, we would expect around a 1% increase in cancer mortality, or around 2100 total cancer deaths among our sample of 10,000 people,

Keep in mind that all 10,000 people in both groups will die from something, many of them will die from cancer, and many other drivers of both all-cause mortality and cancer mortality are far greater factors. Nonetheless, a 1% increase in cancer mortality is not insignificant.

But it’s also important to understand that 100 mSv is actually a very high, and indeed unprecedented, dose in the context of civilian nuclear energy, about ten times greater than the average cumulative dose that people living in the areas contaminated by the Chernobyl accident were exposed to over the subsequent twenty years, three times greater than the dose that people evacuated from the exclusion zone in very close proximity to the Chernobyl plant were exposed to, and twice the dose that people who illegally moved back into the exclusion zone in the years following the accident were exposed to.

These exposures occurred in the aftermath of an accident that was, by far, the worst in the history of civilian nuclear energy—stemming from an obviously dangerous design prone to runaway reactions, built with no containment system, and operated by a negligent, totalitarian government. The result was a meltdown and radioactive fire that burned openly for three weeks. Even so, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation concluded in 2008 that other than a handful of deaths associated with plant staff and emergency workers who received very high doses responding to the accident and 6000 preventable thyroid cancers (Soviet authorities chose not distribute iodine tablets in hopes that the world wouldn’t learn about the accident), “there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure.”

No other civilian nuclear accident has ever been remotely comparable. Despite the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that crippled the plant, the Fukushima accident, occurring at reactors with multiple containment systems that all operating commercial reactors today feature, released about 10% as much radiological material into the environment as Chernobyl. Three Mile Island, which suffered a partial meltdown, released such minimal radioactive material that even at the perimeter of the power plant, someone standing at the fenceline and taking no preventative action for a week as the accident unfolded would have received less than half the annual background radiation dose typical for the region.

These three cases are the only major accidents in the 65 year history of commercial nuclear energy. So the 100 mSv threshold for observable effects is well beyond that which any significant population anywhere in the world has ever been exposed to from either normal operations of commercial nuclear power plants or an accident. And it is 10,000 times greater than the average dose that someone living near an operating nuclear power plant in the US would receive.

Moreover, there has been no suggestion by any responsible party that radiological health standards for the public or workers actually be raised to 100 mSv, or anywhere close. To the contrary, the new standards proposed by the Department of Energy that Huff is raising alarm about, and that was the subject of an alarmist National Public Radio story by Geoff Brumfeld last week, will likely raise the maximum allowable dose from nuclear plant operations that the public could be exposed to from 1 mSv to 5 mSv, twenty times lower than the 100mSv threshold for observable radiological health effects.

To put that in the context of our hypothetical test and control groups, raising the standard from 1 mSv to 5 mSv means that among our representative test sample of 10,000 Americans, 2005 would die from cancer over the course of their lifetimes, versus 2001 under the old rules, versus 2000 people in the control group… if this unobservable effect exists at all.

Radiological health experts typically frown upon associating a specific number of additional deaths with such low doses given how speculative the entire proposition actually is. But that demonstrates my point. Given the low dose and extreme uncertainty that there is any effect at all, there is no appreciable difference between a 1 mSv maximum dose and a 5 mSv maximum dose. Both doses are far higher than anything that any nuclear reactor would likely expose the public to in anything other than a worst-case accident and yet are still de minimis in relation to a dose that one might reasonably expect to have significant public health consequences.

A 5 mSv maximum dose is equivalent to about 18 months of exposure to background radiation in most parts of the United States or 12 months in a high elevation location such as Denver, Colorado. It is about half the dose that an individual would receive from a pelvic CT scan or one-fifth the dose that they would receive from a full body PET scan. Compared to the maximum allowable dose for the nuclear workforce, which DOE has not proposed to change and which DOE’s long running million person study has found has not experienced any increase in cancer mortality compared with the general population, it is ten times lower.

Tellingly, precautionary claims such as those made by Huff typically avoid specifying just how little is at stake in terms of benefits to public health from regulating radiation exposure at such low levels, typically warning of increased risk relative to stricter standards without referencing the absolute risk associated with these exposures, and then arguing that there is no harm from enforcing more stringent standards so long as they are achievable.

But the harms from overly conservative precautionary regulation of low dose exposures are plain to see. Conventional air pollutants from fossil fuels, by some estimates, kill as many as 300,000 Americans annually. James Hansen and colleagues have estimated that between 1971 and 2009, nuclear power plants saved over half a million lives in the US. Had the build-out of nuclear energy continued in the decades after Three Mile Island, many more lives surely would have been saved.

Exactly how much over-regulation based upon overly conservative exposure limits increased the cost and undermined the deployment of nuclear energy over the last 50 years versus other factors is hard to quantify. Some progressive nuclear advocates, for instance, downplay the significance of regulation, arguing that the effect was modest. But even they generally acknowledge that regulation played some role.

So it is possible that changing radiological health standards will not appreciably change the economic picture for new nuclear technology. But given how little is actually at stake in terms of radiological health consequences to doing so, it seems to me that a broader, and arguably more appropriate and precautionary approach to safeguarding public health actually dictates that we relax the standards and find out. To do otherwise effectively prioritizes avoidance of marginal, speculative, and unobservable radiological health risks over reducing public exposure to actual environmental pollutants produced routinely by the US electricity system that we know are resulting in substantial public health cost and mortality today.

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The Public Confidence Game

One thing that Huff’s essay does demonstrate is that it’s not just nuclear opponents who support the precautionary status quo. There is a substantial constituency within the nuclear energy establishment, as well as the pro-nuclear wing of the Democratic Party, that supports extreme conservatism when it comes to radiological health risk, even while knowing that broadly adopted radiological health standards enforce dose limits that are far below any level that might begin to result in significant public health consequences.

There are multiple reasons for this. But I would argue that the primary reason that so many experts and policy-makers who should know better persist in the misguided defense of indefensible radiological risk conservatism is a folk theory about public opinion that overstates public concern about nuclear energy, misunderstands how the public forms opinions about the technology, and confuses public opinion with elite opinion.

Huff rehearses much of this logic in her essay, arguing that relaxing low dose radiation standards without new research will “undermine public support for new nuclear reactors” and that the public will not “meekly accept weaker radiation standards without explanation.” But as Kenton de Kirby and I demonstrated in Nuclear Cognition, our comprehensive review of fifty years of survey research, cognitive science, social psychology, and political theory on the subject, this view simply misunderstands how the public engages with and thinks about nuclear energy.

What decades of survey research reveals is not a deep, entrenched, or irrational fear of nuclear energy but low salience and, resultingly, inchoate and inconsistent attitudes. Most people responding to survey questions about nuclear energy have given little if any thought to the subject before they are contacted. “Don’t know” is often the most common response. Question order and wording has an outsized effect on responses. Simply differentiating nuclear energy from nuclear weapons by adding the words “for electricity” to the question often results in substantially higher support.

Nuclear accidents have had little bearing on US public opinion. Support for nuclear energy, for instance, fell faster in the years before the Three Mile Island accident than afterwards. Instead, the strongest predictors of overall public support for nuclear energy have been the price of gasoline and perceptions of energy scarcity. Just as importantly, elite cues and conflict have mattered far more than irrational psychology. These two factors, taken together, explain much of the waxing and waning of public support for nuclear energy over the last 50 years.

The decline in public support for nuclear energy in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s followed a decade of growing elite opposition, starting in the anti-nuclear environmental and student movements of the 1960s and then expanding to media and Democratic elites. It stayed comparatively low from the early 1980s collapse of energy prices through the 2010s, during an era in which nuclear energy was highly contested by the two parties. Over the last decade, it has begun rising again as support among Democratic elites, primarily due to concern about climate change, has grown and energy prices have risen.

So changing radiological health standards to better align them with reasonable protection of public health, or revamping a byzantine NRC regulatory paradigm that has done little to actually improve nuclear safety in recent decades, is not likely, in and of itself, to have much bearing upon public confidence in nuclear energy. What does matter is the posture of opinion elites, most especially those on the center-left.

The irony when Democratic elites like Huff and former NRC Chairman Chris Hanson, who featured prominently in NPR’s coverage, raise concern that changes to the rules will undermine public confidence is that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. What Democratic elites say about these changes has far more bearing on public confidence than the changes themselves.

My point, to be clear, is not that if only policy-makers like Huff and Hanson had faith that these changes will not appreciably affect public health, the public would have faith too. Rather, it is that Huff and Hanson actually know that these changes won’t appreciably affect public health, even granting that the LNT hypothesis holds. The chances of large populations being exposed to either 1 mSv or 5 mSv of ionizing radiation from a nuclear reactor is very low and the consequences of public exposure to 5 mSv of ionizing radiation versus 1 mSv are indiscernible epidemiologically and insignificant.

Yes, the likes of Ed Lyman, the Union of Concerned Scientists long-time anti-nuclear gadfly, will continue to show up on NPR and in the pages of the New York Times to insist that public health and safety are being compromised. And yes, a significant release of radiation from a nuclear plant would surely spark local, if not national concern. But the relative level that federal standards for low dose radiation exposure are set at won’t have much bearing on either.

We know from three decades of Ed Lyman that Ed Lyman will do Ed Lyman no matter what this or any other administration or the NRC or the Department of Energy does. Insofar as a low dose release of radiation sparks public concern, there is little reason to think that the precise level at which the NRC sets its health standards will much inform how the public responds.

The public confidence game, in these ways, is circular and well past its sell date. We are over fifty years past the era when the radiological risk norms that both Democrats and much of the nuclear industry continue to adhere to were established. The anti-nuclear movement is dead. The soft energy path is a fantasy. Fear of the unknown when it comes to nuclear energy and radiation may still be around, but new research suggests that it has substantially attenuated.

For nuclear industry leaders today, the challenge and opportunity is not to sustain public confidence but to deliver the goods—clean, reliable, cost-competitive nuclear reactors fit for purpose. Dispensing with outdated radiological health regulations will likely be necessary to deliver innovative nuclear technology expeditiously.

For Democrats, this moment demands charting a plausible path toward decarbonization and serving fast-growing energy demand while avoiding public backlash in response to high electricity prices and an unreliable grid. Cheap, scalable advanced nuclear energy makes threading that needle far easier. We are unlikely to get it without right-sizing radiological health standards and the vast regulatory framework and infrastructure that has grown up around those standards over the last generation. Arguing about speculative cancer deaths from speculative future low dose radiation releases that may not even exist, when verifiable harm is still being caused by fossil fuels, does not serve the public good.

Huff concludes her essay by complaining about the lack of public and expert input to the new standards, comparing the current process unfavorably to the last NRC reconsideration of LNT, in 2021. But that process took 6 years and resulted in no change to any health standard. Hanson’s NRC, meanwhile, took almost 7 years to promulgate a new licensing framework for advanced reactors that proposed modest changes from the agency’s long-standing, highly conservative rules for licensing large light water reactors. This is not a recipe for modernizing nuclear regulation or launching a nuclear renaissance.

Bottom-line, there is simply no reasonable basis for the claim that the changes to radiological health standards currently being discussed by the Trump administration and the NRC will be material to the public’s health. Nor that updating those standards will spark a backlash from the general public. It’s time to get on with the business of reform at the NRC and building a globally competitive 21st-century nuclear industry.

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This is an excerpt of my opinion essay published in the Washington Post yesterday. You can read the entirety of the essay HERE.

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One of the great ironies of the first Trump administration was that amid all the talk of bleach, horse dewormers, mask mandates and school closures, most people didn’t pay attention to the policy that essentially ended the pandemic: Operation Warp Speed.

A president whose pandemic response was viewed by many as incompetent at best and brazen denial at worst spearheaded the development of the coronavirus vaccine, an accomplishment that Donald Trump hardly talks about lest he alienate his MAHA wing. Meanwhile, many in the public health establishment, which today recoils in horror at the current administration’s anti-vax posture, were skeptical of Trump’s ambitious timeline for a vaccine.

One year into the second Trump administration, a similar dynamic could be underway around climate change. Trump has described it as a Chinese hoax. His administration has withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate agreement, slashed funding for climate research and laid waste to greenhouse gas regulations, all to the consternation of environmentalists and Democrats.

But the administration has also launched the most ambitious effort to commercialize new nuclear energy technology since the Eisenhower administration’s Atoms for Peace initiative. The goal is to develop smaller and more nimble reactors to help meet a growing demand for energy, which is partly driven by an explosion of data centers for the artificial intelligence boom.

Read the Full Essay HERE

This essay was originally published by the The Boston Globe as “The world’s biggest climate goal was a waste of time and money”.

No one is sure exactly how much money the United Nations’ most recent climate confab in Belém, Brazil, cost. The Brazilian government may have spent as much as $1 billion on the November event. Spending by other public and private interests to accommodate almost 60,000 official delegates and countless further corporate and nonprofit participants surely rivaled the government’s expenditures. Whatever the final tally, it almost certainly exceeded the $350 million that rich countries, after years of wrangling, have ponied up in recent years to compensate poor countries for climate losses and damages.

Thirty years after the first Council of Parties, or COP, conference was held in Berlin in 1995, it is not at all clear what the long-running UN-led effort to galvanize international action on climate change has accomplished. Official accounts are contradictory. The UN and other parties insist the world faces dire consequences should atmospheric warming exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. At the same time, many of those voices also claim that international efforts marshaled by the COP have already averted catastrophe, reducing likely warming by the end of this century from 5 degrees Celsius to less than 3 degrees.

The first claim is dubious. There has never been any credible science establishing that 1.5 degrees marks a threshold beyond which catastrophe is assured. The 1.5 degree target was originally put forward in 2009 by small island nations arguing that they would be inundated by rising seas if the world surpassed it. But there is little evidence to date that rising sea levels have particularly threatened the future of island nations. To the contrary, many continue to add coastline and land area through landfilling and other coastal modifications, as low-lying regions have for many centuries. One recent survey found that 221 atolls across the Pacific and Indian Oceans had increased their land mass by 6 percent between 2000 and 2017 despite rising sea levels. So while there is significant uncertainty about how fast sea levels will rise in the coming decades, low-lying areas including small island nations will likely have substantial capability to adapt to those changes.

Nonetheless, in the years after it was adopted at the Paris COP in 2015 as an “aspirational” target, 1.5 degrees has taken on a life of its own. The World Economic Forum claims that “1.5°C is a physical limit beyond which Earth systems enter a danger zone of cascading climate tipping points that propel further warming.” UN Secretary General António Guterres opened the COP plenary in Belém by asserting that “1.5°C limit is a red line for humanity.”

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These warnings conflate highly speculative concerns about triggering irreversible geophysical processes with claims that climate calamity has already arrived in the form of present-day disasters. But the data tell a different story. Mortality due to climate-related extremes and disasters of all sorts has fallen dramatically over all relevant timescales. 2025 will likely feature the lowest mortality from climate-related disasters in recorded human history. The economic costs of disasters continue to rise, as the world is both richer and more populous than ever. But those costs have declined significantly as a share of global GDP. Despite the warming climate, human societies are today more resilient to climatic extremes than they have ever been.

The second claim — that international efforts have already averted catastrophe — is risible. The COP negotiations and the Paris Agreement have not significantly altered the trajectory of global emissions. The ostensible progress is an artifact of the misuse of emissions scenarios projecting 5 degrees Celsius or more of future warming, which were never plausible, not a shift in the underlying characteristics of the global energy economy. The carbon intensity of the global economy has been falling at a consistent rate for decades, since at least the energy crises of the 1970s, when nations began collecting decent data. Most advanced developed nations have seen falling emissions for the last two decades or longer, as population and economic growth have slowed and energy technologies have continued to improve. The same processes are now underway across much of the rest of the world.

None of these developments are attributable to the COP process, which was originally intended to negotiate a binding international treaty to limit emissions. The 1997 Kyoto Accord collapsed after COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009. In its aftermath, the 2015 Paris Agreement shifted to voluntary actions, in which individual nation-states proffered Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), laying out development pathways to limit emissions. A decade later, few nations are on track to meet their NDCs. With updates due by the end of the year, fewer than half of the participating countries submitted new NDCs in advance of the conference.

Instead, the world has made progress toward decarbonization and adaptation not because of the UN-led effort but in spite of it. The main drivers of emissions trajectories nationally and globally have always been macroeconomic and technological, not political. The primary determinants of climate impacts on human societies are socioeconomic, not climatological. Nations have always had good reasons to invest in energy technology innovation, promote socioeconomic development, and pursue resilience to natural disasters without any reference to climate change at all.

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In the aftermath of the latest COP, much of the attention has focused on what was absent, not what was accomplished. The Trump administration not only pulled out of the Paris Agreement but chose not to send any official delegation to COP30 at all. Bill Gates, arguably the world’s most important climate philanthropist, announced in the run-up to the conference that he was shifting his focus from climate change to poverty alleviation and global health. Both moves have been widely criticized as blows to the climate effort. But it is entirely possible that they may do more to address the problem than anything produced at recent COPs.

Notwithstanding its climate skepticism, the Trump administration’s determination to double down on US natural gas production and exports is likely to accelerate the global coal-to-gas transition, while its unprecedented commitments to commercializing a new generation of advanced nuclear reactors could end up accelerating decarbonization in coming decades. Gates’s shift to poverty and public health, similarly, may do far more to improve resilience to climate extremes among the most vulnerable than the COPs’ long-running dramas around loss and damages and climate adaptation funding.

On each of these fronts, the COP conferences not only have proved to be a waste of time and resources but have often actively caused harm. Until recently, for instance, all discussion of nuclear energy, still the world’s largest source of clean energy, was limited to side events at COP meetings. COPs over the last decade have resulted in outright bans on investment by multilateral institutions like the World Bank in fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure in poor countries, which contribute almost nothing to global emissions and whose vulnerability to climatic extremes is due to energy poverty, not a changing climate. Rich country commitments to provide mitigation and adaptation aid to poor countries, meanwhile, have not increased the aid those countries receive. Instead, they have diverted funds from proven development activities such as education and public health programs toward dubious mitigation and adaptation projects.

Despite these serial failures and the harm that they have caused, there appears to be no interest at the UN or other quarters of the climate community in reconsidering whether the annual COP conferences serve any real purpose. Next year, all of the same players will gather in the Mediterranean resort city of Antalya, Turkey, to replay the same debates and drama that we just witnessed in Brazil. Billions of dollars that might be spent on bed nets or childhood vaccinations will instead be wasted on flying the global climate commentariat and the huge government, nonprofit, and corporate sustainability sector that has grown up around it to hobnob and speechify and make empty commitments. For this reason, it is not enough to simply ignore the UN’s annual climate bacchanal as a pointless contrivance. It’s long past time to abolish it.

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The end of the Biden Administration marked the end of an era. The long effort to center climate change as the organizing principle for Democratic energy and economic policy collapsed under the weight of inflation, polarization, and proceduralism. In its place has risen a nascent bipartisan consensus focused on affordability, regulatory reform, nuclear energy, and all-of-the-above energy abundance.

Each of these ascendent priorities comports with themes that the Breakthrough Institute has long expounded. We were among the first civil society advocates in the US and globally to make the case for cheap, abundant energy, to recognize nuclear power as an essential climate solution, and to understand that deregulation held the key to many important environmental outcomes.

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As a result, Breakthrough is far better positioned for the current moment and the second Trump administration than most environmental and clean energy advocates. This has enabled us to effectively defend public investment in energy innovation and clean baseload power in the Big Beautiful Bill, to shape nuclear policy at the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and to inform both parties’ policy priorities amid ongoing congressional permitting reform negotiations. More broadly, as the lead organizers of this fall’s Abundance 2025 conference, we’ve played an outsized role in birthing a new cross-partisan energy politics for the post-climate era.

Over twenty years after the publication of the “The Death of Environmentalism,” what was once prophecy has largely come to pass. The legacy environmental movement is a shell of its former self, still capable of obstruction but intellectually exhausted and politically impotent. The folly of apocalyptic messages and the politics of limits is now undeniable. Love or hate the Trump administration, it is serious about unleashing America’s promethean possibilities in a way that no US administration of recent memory compares. Democrats too increasingly recognize this imperative. America will build again or it will die.

Now, though, is not the time for a victory lap. This decade offers a generational opportunity to remake 50 years of environmental law and policy, to relaunch a globally competitive American nuclear industry, and to build a new ecomodernist politics of abundance for the 21st century. The signs all augur well and we remain grateful for the enduring support of our donors and allies. But there is much work still to do.

Read our 2025 Annual Report HERE

In the year or so since it became clear that the second Trump administration and Republican Congress were dead set on dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act and the Biden Administration’s “whole of government” climate policies, much of the left of center commentariat has undergone an about face on how the world would tackle climate change. The claim, repeated endlessly, that the passage of the IRA marked a historic inflection point in which the United States was ushering in a new era of global green industrial policy, has been memory holed. Now China is the world’s climate savior, a nascent “green electrostate” that is rapidly rewriting the rules of how the global energy economy operates.

Historian Nils Gilman, in Foreign Policy, goes so far as to predict an “eco-ideological” Cold War pitting a potential Sino-European “green entente” against a U.S.-led “petro bloc.” Bill McKibben warns of a Chinese-led green energy revolution that could turn the U.S. into a museum of obsolete technologies. James Meadway scoffs that China has “obliterated the ‘we can’t do anything about climate change because CHINA’ argument.” Noah Smith credits China with “quietly saving the world.”

All argue that China is opening a new chapter in the energy transition by converting its economy to run on electricity, expanding its domination of clean energy technology, and paving the way to global decarbonization. The global superpower of the future, many claim, will run on electricity generated with clean energy, mostly solar power.

These claims hinge on a number of promising trends. Chinese manufacturing prowess has driven down the cost of solar panels and batteries precipitously and its annual installed capacity of wind and solar generation dwarfs that of any other nation in the world. The advent of electric vehicles has catapulted China’s automobile industry to the cutting edge of global competitiveness in the span of a decade. And it has now climbed among the ranks of Norway, Sweden, Japan, and Taiwan in terms of its electrified share of total energy consumption, surpassing the United States, Germany, and most other advanced developed economies.

But these trends do not remotely make a green electrostate. Coal still generated 59% of Chinese electricity in 2024, with China in total consuming a whopping 56% of all coal used globally. Vanishingly little coal capacity in China has been retired.

Though battery electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles now represent a majority of new vehicle sales in China, only one in 10 cars on Chinese roads today is electric. To achieve full electrification of its transportation sector, China will need to replace an estimated 400 million fossil-fueled vehicles. And while electrifying the transportation sector is one way that China seeks to reduce dependence on imported liquid fuels, drilling for natural gas from the nation’s potentially sizable domestic reserves is another—a trend that has quietly put China on track to surpass Iran as the world’s third-largest natural gas producer, with 40% of its production in 2023 coming from non-conventional sources.

The characterization of China as a rising green electrostate—in contrast to Trump’s American petrostate—serves a variety of discursive purposes in political debates. But this reading of energy geopolitics misrepresents both Chinese reality and intent. China will likely continue to dominate the green technology sector. But its industrial economy will almost certainly remain powered and heated by coal and gas for decades and Chinese nickel, alumina, metal silicon, and plastics will continue to undercut overseas producers on the basis of cheap fossil energy rather than affordable clean power.

For regions like Europe or North America contemplating their trade relations and industrial competitiveness, an important key to Chinese export strength is precisely that it increasingly leads the world in many finished and end use green technologies while lagging environmentally in its industrial sectors. Policymakers and pundits misreading this strategy as that of an ascendant green electrostate do so at their own risk.

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Not Green

Inspect satellite imagery for almost any midsized Chinese industrial city, and coal storage bunkers each around 300 meters in length often stand out as among the largest structures visible, frequently clustered near the largest local power plants and metal foundries.

In a surprising number of cases, fossil-fueled industrial clusters are fresh new investments in strategic sectors, not old obsolete facilities with one foot in the retirement grave. Over half a dozen new large coal units are mid-construction or complete across the large desert industrial parks north of Ürümqi, Xinjiang, feeding new aluminum, metal silicon, and ultrapure polysilicon plants. A flourishing cluster of new coal-to-chemical plants are entering operation around the city of Yulin in Shaanxi, buoyed by national government endorsement of coal-derived chemicals as a “new productive force”. A large aluminum smelting complex outside Qiaotou in Qinghai is dramatically expanding its onsite coal generation.

Meanwhile from coastal Fujian to Shandong to Liaoning, vast new portside industrial complexes are literally rising from the sea to produce petrochemicals and plastic precursors. Nearby, liquified natural gas terminals are expanding storage tank capacity in anticipation of steadily growing demand, while the national government flirts with new pipeline construction including cross-border projects with Russia.

China’s new automotive industry strength, similarly, sits at the intersection of manufacturing innovation and the nation’s vast furnaces of fossil-based mineral processing and industrial production. China controls more than 90% of global magnesium output, critical for aluminum alloys and lightweight cast magnesium parts, precisely thanks to methodical un-electrification of magnesium smelting using the heat energy and labor-intensive but cheap Pidgeon process which, alongside aggressive dumping on international markets, has gradually put electrified magnesium producers in Norway, Canada, and France out of business.

Much of the nickel in steel alloys and battery chemicals now comes from Chinese co-owned mining industrial parks in Indonesia with attached coal plants, which have overturned global nickel markets using the emissions-intensive high pressure acid leaching and nickel pig iron pathway to make use of more difficult-to-process Indonesian nickel ores. China, meanwhile, produces over half of its battery graphite synthetically, accounting for 97% of global synthetic graphite anode production, having built up much of its synthetic graphite industry in coal-intensive provinces where the electricity-intensive process was cheapest.

So while China’s progress on clean energy and vehicles has stoked hopes that a sweeping green transformation is not only possible but compatible with China’s economic goals—and even a key element of China’s bid for superpower status, the reality is that coal remains the “ballast rock” of China’s energy supply, according to both government policy statements and domestic media reporting, providing cheap electricity, industrial heat, and chemical inputs for much of the industrial economy.

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Not An Electrostate

The other half of the green electrostate hype is predicated upon China’s comparatively high rate of electrification. China has succeeded in electrifying over 30% of its energy economy, higher than the US and many other advanced developed economies and about the same as Japan. But China’s comparatively high electrification rate is not what its green electrostate boosters imagine.

While electric vehicles account for about twice the share of total vehicles in China as in Europe, for instance, China boasts many fewer private vehicles per capita than Europe or the United States, about a third as many as the US and less than half as many as Europe. As a result, both total vehicle emissions and the energy demands of the transportation sector represent a smaller share of China’s total emissions and energy economy respectively than in most other advanced developed economies. Emissions from China’s coal-to-chemicals sector alone (690 million tons CO2 in 2024), for instance, approaches that of the country’s entire transportation sector (around 800 million tons CO2).

For this reason, China’s world leading electric vehicle industry doesn’t really account for its high overall electrification. Transportation only makes up about 15.6% of China’s final energy consumption and electricity only accounts for 6.8% of total energy consumption in the transportation sector.

Rather, much of the electrification of China’s energy economy has occurred in the industrial sector, which accounts for 60% of the country’s final energy consumption. But that is not because China has figured out how to electrify industrial and manufacturing processes that other industrialized countries have not. To the contrary, China has been playing catch-up with most advanced industrialized economies in numerous areas of industrial electrification.

Electrified steel production from recycled scrap, for instance, is likely to miss the government’s 2025 target of 15% of total steel production, lagging well behind India (58.8%), Japan (26.2%), the United States (71.8%), and the global average (30%).

Where China has been replacing direct coal heating in manufacturing, much of it has been in sectors where Europe or North America haven’t burned significant coal in generations. Out of 127 million net fewer tons of coal burned in 2022 relative to 2015 across China’s non-mining industrial sector, 42 million tons were saved by reducing coal burning in textiles, with an added net 25 million tons saved from the paper and food industries, plus another 27 million tons reduced across the pharmaceuticals, rubber, plastics, electrical machinery, and automobile sectors.

Meanwhile cement production and its corresponding heat inputs, has declined in recent years amid a slowdown in construction, such that a 17% decrease in cement output more or less fully explains an 18% decrease in coal energy use in China’s non-metallic mineral sector between 2022 and 2015. During this same time, the industrial sector has continued a greater shift to manufacturing, high-tech sectors, and equipment production that is already relatively more electrified.

China’s electrification of its economy, in other words, is not comparatively high because it has succeeded in electrifying its industrial sector to a greater degree than its competitors but because its industrial sector consumes twice the share of final energy demand compared to other major economies. At the same time, European or North American engineers likely wouldn’t view many specific drivers of Chinese industrial electrification as particularly impressive.

Indeed, the think tank Ember has observed that electricity-driven fossil fuels substitution in 2023 (73.4 TWh) had slowed relative to 2019 (>200 TWh). The report authors attribute this to the exhaustion of low-hanging fruit—electric boilers replacing loose coal residential heating and electrification of basic processes in “textiles, food, and light manufacturing.”

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China-Scale Green Arbitrage

Situated in advanced developed economies that consume prodigiously but have outsourced much of their industry and manufacturing, it is perhaps not so surprising that many Western observers have fixated on the finished products and not the vast supply chains and manufacturing infrastructure necessary to produce them. But it is China’s non-carbon constrained energy-industrial model, not electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries, and heat pumps, that has rewritten the rules of the global game.

For rich nations that can stomach China’s human rights abuses and fossil-heavy production, alongside a declining domestic industrial base and new geopolitical vulnerabilities, becoming vassals to China’s green tech imperium is, perhaps, a viable path toward climate mitigation. Even so, twenty to thirty percent of emissions in advanced industrial economies still come from the industrial sector, and rich countries haven’t had much more success decarbonizing those emissions than has China.

McKibben and others have also made much of the transformative potential of cheap solar in poor countries like Pakistan. But while solar and batteries give households and small businesses in those places an alternative to grid electricity, they are not a viable means of powering industrial activities and manufacturing, which historically have been the path that poor countries have taken to increasing incomes and consumption, and hence living standards.

So a sober assessment of China’s actions and motivations suggests that the country is highly unlikely to “speed up time” and take the world “through the looking glass… to zero by 2050,” as economic historian Adam Tooze recently suggested. China’s massive industrial sector and increasingly hegemonic position in global manufacturing is sui generis. Green and electrified or not, China’s unique political economy is neither a savior nor a model for either advanced developed or developing economies.

The current focus among Western commentators on China as a climate leader is rather a backdoor effort to recenter the climate issue in the West at a moment when other concerns have taken precedence, not least among them U.S.-China tensions, as well as the rise of artificial intelligence, and the demise of multilateralism. Beijing has fed these efforts with propaganda. Well-coordinated messaging on China’s technological primacy is everywhere, coupled with a clever cosplay of climate multilateralism. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. and European climate movements have swallowed these claims hook, line, and sinker. These “Spamoflauge” social media posts tell a broader story as well, advertising China as high-tech, in implicit contrast with an American empire seemingly in decline and unable to build things or take on grand challenges like climate change.

Many of those implicit concerns are not without merit. The industrial and manufacturing model that has brought the world cheap renewables, batteries, and electric vehicles may, as Gilman, Tooze, and others argue, offer an alternative template for social, political, and economic modernization, one that Western powers are only beginning to reckon with. But once you come to terms with the reality that China’s development and modernization does not follow the Western model—not least because it is far easier to engineer the future in the absence of Western-style democratic pluralism—there is little reason to think that China’s energy development will be much shaped by that most Western and parochial of modernization characteristics, namely environmentalism.

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A few weeks ago, I was reminiscing about the Death of Environmentalism controversy with Adam Werbach. Adam had followed up the original essay with a speech at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club that was no less controversial, not least because Adam had just a few years before been handpicked by David Brower to become the boy president of the Sierra Club at the age of 23, in hopes of putting a youthful face on an institution that, even thirty years ago, was obviously geriatric.

The ideas in The Death of Environmentalism and Is Environmentalism Dead? had been well received by a lot of people, particularly of Adam and my generation. But the negative reactions and lectures that we got from the Baby Boom leadership of the environmental movement were intense. Every major environmental NGO and philanthropy was still run by that generation. For Boomers whose identities had been forged in youthful rebellion, getting out of the way so a new generation could remake the movement most definitely wasn’t on the agenda.

This dynamic was broadly true of all of the social movements that were born in the Baby Boomer’s coming of age moment in the 1960s and built in the decades that followed. Boomers had systematically and singularly transformed America’s institutions and culture to a degree that no generation, before or since, has. If you came of age in their shadow, it was hard to get a word in edge-wise, much less drive real change in any of the institutions that they had built.

There is a broader lesson here. Like science, progress and social movements advance one funeral (or at least retirement) at a time. Institutions need to continually renew themselves or they stagnate. That is especially true for those of us in the ideas business. And it is no less true of my own institution than the institutions that I have long criticized for their failure to evolve. I turned 60 in October and have spent the last 20 years building the Breakthrough Institute. This coming year, I’ll begin the process of getting out of the way.

On January 1st, I will become President of the Breakthrough Institute and Alex Trembath will become the Executive Director. To the relief of some and consternation of others, I have no plans to retire. I’ll continue to work with Alex to set the strategic and political direction of the organization and with Adam Stein to oversee our nuclear work. There is also ongoing work to build Breakthrough and the ecomodernist movement internationally, to put boots on the ground at the local level to build an abundant energy future here in the United States, and, perhaps, a book project that Alex and I have been hatching over the last few years. But I will be handing over a lot of the day to day responsibilities to Alex.

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Alex likes to say that he worked his way up from the factory floor. And it’s true. He started as a Breakthrough Generation summer research fellow in 2011. He has been an analyst, our communications director, and our deputy director. His is a singular public voice in the climate and clean energy discourse and, more recently, the Abundance movement.

Over the last decade, Alex has helped me build Breakthrough from what was still a rather tenuous startup to the force that it has become in both the climate, energy, and environmental debates and Washington policy-making circles today. When I started Breakthrough with Michael Shellenberger almost twenty years ago, there were two of us, part-time, and a couple of college students. Today, we have 25 full-time staff, many with advanced degrees and long publication records. Increasingly over the last few years, Alex has been my peer and partner in that effort. It is time to recognize him formally as such, not least because founder-centered organizations often founder over succession and I’m determined that Breakthrough will not succumb to that particular pathology.

Alongside new leadership at the staff level, we’ll also be making a big change at the Board level. Our long-time board chair, Rachel Pritzker, will be stepping down at the end of the year. Tisha Schuller, who has served on the Breakthrough board since 2017 will be moving into that role.

Rachel has been our first and only board chair. Her influence in the worlds of climate, nuclear, and democracy philanthropy has been remarkable and without her leadership, Breakthrough surely wouldn’t exist. Rachel has been no less a partner in this quixotic enterprise than Michael was at the beginning and Alex is now, and while she will no longer serve as board chair, she will continue to support our work as a board member and funder.

Tisha tracked me down over a decade ago, a few years after she had ditched her career as an environmental consultant to take the job as the director of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. We bonded over our shared beliefs that the coal to gas transition would be a key driver of emissions decline and a key enabler for wind and solar generation and that cheap, abundant energy holds the key to both human thriving and environmental protection. We both have taken a lot of grief for those heresies, as the climate movement predictably chose to look the gift horse that is the shale gas revolution in the mouth. But the view that natural gas is a crucial bridge fuel in the transition toward a low carbon future, in Colorado, the United States, and globally, was correct then and is still correct today and the imperative to end energy poverty is today broadly recognized as a key global priority.

Tisha now runs her own consultancy and is the author of four books about energy, the environment, and human development. As the U.S., the Democratic Party, and the world wake up from the millenarian fever dream that has informed climate politics and policy over the last decade, I’m thrilled to have Tisha as our board chair and my partner alongside Alex as we figure out what comes next.

Change and renewal, of course, are easy enough to talk about, far harder to enact. Installing Adam as a figurehead thirty years ago—as anyone who has kept up with the Sierra Club’s more recent travails will recognize—was no fix for an organization that in the intervening years has managed to become increasingly sclerotic while entirely losing its way at the same time. Renewal, by contrast, tends to succeed, at both the personal and institutional level, when it becomes an ongoing practice, one that balances continuity with transformation and cultivates the wisdom to tell them apart.

What has kept Breakthrough unique, unclassifiable, and consistently at the cutting edge of climate and energy discourse and policy over the last twenty years has been a willingness to creatively destroy our own work, whether that was a long-standing event like the Breakthrough Dialogue or a long-standing idea, such as the notion that climate change is an existential risk or that the world can be powered predominantly with variable renewable energy. It has also been due to a willingness to give dynamic young leaders the platform, permission, and support to undertake intellectually and politically challenging work.

What has remained unchanged is an abiding faith in the power of the human spirit, technology, and modernization to remake our worlds and a determination to remain intellectually honest, epistemically open, and politically unclassifiable. As I, and Breakthrough, embark on this new era, I will be as excited as anyone to see what comes next.

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I was privileged this week to give the 2025 James L. Huffman Lecture at the Lewis and Clark Law School, which features one the leading environmental law programs in the country. What follows is a lightly edited version of my remarks.

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In the summer of 1963, my father, Bob Nordhaus came to Washington, fresh out of Yale Law School and ready to help build Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. He started out doing tax law but quickly shifted gears and increasingly came to specialize in environmental law just as the foundational federal environmental statutes of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s were being enacted. I like to joke that my father was the first environmental lawyer in Washington. He never identified as such. But while I can’t exactly prove the claim and I’m not even sure how one might adjudicate it, he surely was among the first practitioners of what we now call environmental law in the nation’s capitol.

During those years, he had a major hand in drafting almost all of those foundational laws—the Federal Clean Air and Water Acts, the Federal Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. He is credited with personally drafting Section 111D of the Clean Air Act, the provision under which the EPA has attempted to regulate carbon dioxide as an air pollutant. He also played a major role in drafting most of the post-oil embargo federal energy policy of the 1970s. After passage of the Federal Energy Reorganization Act in 1974, he was delegated to the Federal Energy Administration to help create what would become the Department of Energy and then served during the Carter Administration as the first general counsel to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, where he drafted and implemented the rules that opened up the US electrical grid to merchant power providers and renewable energy.

He was a lifelong Democrat and after a few years in private practice, he went back into government as General Counsel to the Department of Energy in the first Clinton administration, just as the US and the world began to grapple with the problem of climate change. That experience inspired him to build what is generally regarded as the first climate legal practice in Washington after he left government for good.

When he started, in the late 1960s, there was little by way of an environmental movement and nothing in the way of environmental law courses, specialists, or clinics in law schools like this one. And yet, without either a movement, a corpus of legal theory and case law, or an army of practitioners, the United States passed a series of profound and far reaching environmental laws over the course of little more than five years unlike anything that has occurred before or since. And the results were impressive. By the mid-1990s, the nation’s air and waterways had become dramatically cleaner. EPA rules had largely phased out leaded gasoline. And the Endangered Species Act brought iconic species such as the Bald Eagle and the Humpback Whale from the brink of extinction.

By the time that he died, in 2016, the US environmental movement had become a multi-billion dollar enterprise. Walk around Washington today and you will find entire buildings owned by major environmental NGOs and stocked with armies of lawyers, scientists, advocates, and political operatives. And yet, one would be hard pressed to think of a single federal law passed by the US Congress over the last 30 years that remotely rivals any of the foundational laws passed in the early days of environmental law and policy-making, not since at least the 1990 amendments to the Federal Clean Air Act, which took on, and solved the acid rain issue and significantly expanded federal regulatory efforts to address air toxics.

Since then, the most significant legislative accomplishments of the environmental movement have been passage of subsidy programs for clean technology through Democratic budget reconciliation packages, the most significant of which, the Inflation Reduction Act, was largely repealed just a few years later when political control of Congress and the White House flipped. Congressional efforts to tax and regulate greenhouse gas emissions, meanwhile, have failed so spectacularly that neither the Biden administration nor Congressional Democrats, despite proclaiming climate change to be an existential threat befitting a “whole of government” campaign to eliminate emissions, even attempted to legislate emissions limits or taxes while they controlled both the executive and legislative branches.

Instead, most of the action has shifted to the executive branch and the courts. Democratic presidents have used their powers to designate national monuments and taken other actions to protect public lands from various forms of development and use. And we’ve witnessed incremental expansions of federal environmental regulatory powers, achieved either via executive fiat by Democratic administrations or through evolving case law and legal precedent via the courts. Whatever progress these latter efforts have achieved, it would seem that the pace of progress toward improving the environment over the last fifty plus years has been inversely proportional to the scale, sophistication, and resources of the environmental movement and the environmental law community.

So what I want to talk about today is three things. First, why, despite so many more resources being dedicated to the problem, progress has slowed. Second, what exactly is it that all these environmental lawyers, upwards of 30,000 nationally according to Grok, have been up to. And third, whether the modes of legal and policy combat that have become so ingrained within the environmental movement are hindering, or helping, the cause and what needs to come next.

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Polarization, Resistance, and Diminishing Returns

Let’s begin with the why first. Why, after such stunning success in the first decade or so after the late 1960s flowering of the environmental movement, has progress been so much more halting?

Well one reason, the one that the environmental community tends to emphasize almost exclusively, is that the business community mobilized to resist further strengthening of environmental laws. And this is surely true. Early environmental advocacy swept through Congress much the way that European diseases swept through the pre-Columbian populations of the Americas. There was no resistance.

Almost all of the modern methods that corporations today use to influence government and policy-making—political action committees, sustained and professionalized lobbying operations, public advocacy campaigns, fly-ins and other efforts to bring local leaders and citizens to Washington to lobby their representatives—were invented originally by the public interest movements of the 1960s and 70s. But it didn’t take long for corporate America to catch on and, as a result, the blitzkrieg that characterized the first decade of federal environmental policy-making morphed into the trench warfare that has characterized the last four decades.

A second reason progress has slowed has been the increasing polarization of American politics. You can go back and read Richard Nixon’s statements about the environment in the early 1970s and he often sounds like a degrowther. Nixon didn’t, by most accounts, mean very much of it. But the fact that he felt the need to speak about the environment in this way points to just how different the political environment was.

America’s great environmental accomplishments were achieved just as the post-war liberal consensus was drawing to a close. Thanks to the New Deal, the war effort, and the extraordinary success of America’s mixed post-war economy, Americans had far greater faith in government. The Cold War and the presence of an ideological competitor to the American-led liberal international order imposed strong incentives on both parties to cooperate to some degree on issues like civil rights, poverty, and the environment, the better to demonstrate America’s superiority to Soviet communism.

The two political parties were also less coherent ideologically and more organized around parochial concerns. It is not coincidental that the last great federal environmental legislative achievement, the 1990 Clean Air Act, came just as the Cold War was drawing to a close and was largely a regional battle, uniting Democrats and Republicans representing the Northeast, which bore the brunt of the acid rain problem against Democrats and Republicans from the industrial midwest, where the pollutants responsible for the problem were being emitted.

But a third reason has been just how successful those early environmental efforts were. Even before the wave of environmental laws in the early 1970s, many pollution problems had vastly improved. Consider that the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire, which famously sparked much of that era’s activism and policy advocacy, was the last significant river fire in American history, and it was hardly significant. It burned for about 15 minutes and had been extinguished before anyone was able to take a picture of it. As Case Western Law School’s Jonathan Adler has documented, industrial river fires occurred regularly throughout the late 19th and early 20th century. The photo of a burning river that Time Magazine splashed across its cover a few weeks later was identified as the Cuyahoga River but was actually that of a far larger river fire in Pittsburgh that had burned for several days more than a decade earlier.

Smog produced from automobiles, by contrast, was a relatively more recent problem, as car culture took hold amidst the post-war economic boom. But air quality too, mostly due to both industrial activities and the widespread use of coal and wood to heat homes, had been far worse in most American cities in the decades prior to America’s great environmental awakening.

To be clear, even though the public health and visual impacts of environmental pollution may not have been as bad in 1968 as they were in 1948 or 1928 or 1888, they were still quite significant. For this reason, major new federal efforts to reduce those impacts brought big results in short order. Scrubbers and catalytic converters were fairly straightforward end of pipe technological fixes that imposed modest costs. Eliminating major applications of a handful of industrial pollutants with clear environmental consequences—such as DDT, leaded gasoline, and mercury—brought huge benefits.

But as those improvements were realized, further environmental regulatory efforts have brought diminishing returns at increasing cost. After the year 2000 or so, the benefits of new environmental law and policy were increasingly tenuous. New environmental laws and regulations brought largely theoretical benefits. But while you could justify them in theory based upon extrapolating pollution impacts from dose-response models, the actual consequences were difficult to observe in the noisy real world, where they are confounded by all sorts of other social, demographic, genetic, and behavioral factors that often have far greater consequences for public health.

One major Canadian study, for instance, estimated that 90% of environmental cancer burden was attributable to just three sources—solar radiation, naturally occurring radon gas, and particulate air pollution. Only the last of these represents the sort of according to hoyle environmental pollution that the environmental movement has spent the last 50 years attempting to regulate, and even that pollution results from many natural and human activities, from wood burning fireplaces to wildfires to agricultural tillage that the environmental movement has not much concerned itself with.

So in summary, the costs of achieving these increasingly modest environmental gains were greater and there was a well organized and resourced opposition dedicated to emphasizing them to the public and policy-makers. And the political climate was increasingly hostile. Merging the environmental movement with the Democratic Party sparked an equal and opposite reaction within the Republican Party and the public was increasingly skeptical of both the overheated claims of environmentalists and the efficacy of government to effectively address environmental problems at acceptable costs.

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The Deep Environmental Regulatory State

The response to these challenges, from the environmental movement broadly and the environmental law community more specifically, however, was not to recalibrate. Rather, it was to burrow in and attempt to repurpose the foundational legal frameworks of the early 1970s towards purposes for which they were never intended.

So now, over the last decade, we’ve seen the Obama and Biden Administration attempt to use the federal Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions from power plants and tailpipes in lieu of legislating a durable approach to climate mitigation. Environmental groups and Democratic administrations use the Clean Water Acts’ “Waters of the United States” provision, which was explicitly intended to protect navigable waterways, to regulate and limit development around ephemeral streams and seasonal wetlands. The Endangered Species Act, inspired by the plight of charismatic megafauna like the bald eagle, the blue whale, and the grey wolf is now invoked to protect subspecies, and even varieties, of plants that often can’t be differentiated without a genetic test. And the National Environmental Policy Act, intended to inform federal agency decisions and increase public participation has become, as my colleague and Lewis and Clark alum Elizabeth McCarthy put it, a “litigation hydra” and all-purpose tool through which well heeled private interests, often in the name of the public interest, are able to endlessly relitigate public policies and projects that have been approved by policy-makers who are actually accountable to the public.

The result has been a form of “politics by other means” through which the environmental movement has substituted legal and regulatory legerdemain for the difficult work of building durable, cross partisan political coalitions. Under the best of cases, this strategy has resulted in pitched federal regulatory battles that have seesawed from one administration to another over policies that won’t have much real world impact. Consider the now decade-long effort to use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions. The Obama administration proposed the Clean Power Plan, designating the combined cycle natural gas plant as the best available mitigation technology and attempting to transform a command and control regulatory framework into a trading program for which there was no statutory authorization. The Trump administration abandoned the Clean Power Plan and proposed instead a minimal heat rate requirement for coal plants. The Biden Administration then proposed to designate entirely unproven carbon capture technologies as the best available technology in a transparent attempt to assure that fossil generation would become so costly that utilities would have to make a wholesale switch to clean energy.

Ironically, there is not much evidence that had the Clean Power Plan gone into effect, emissions would be much lower today. The coal to gas transition, which the Obama administration attempted to impose by fiat, was proceeding just fine before the Clean Power Plan was proposed and has continued apace after it was abandoned. If solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicles are all that the environmental movement claims them to be, the same fate will befall the now abandoned Biden era power plant and tailpipe rules.

But just as often, the outcomes of this approach to the environmental movement’s declining social capital have been worse than that, as the slow accretion of regulatory rules, legal precedents, and procedural practices over decades has created real environmental harm. Consider three major efforts to scale up lithium production in Nevada. One was blocked over entirely speculative concerns that exploratory boreholes would impact the water table and threaten a species of endangered poolfish that lives in a sinkhole nearby. One was blocked due to a subspecies of wild buckwheat only identified by plant biologists a few decades ago. And one was blocked over claims that it threatened the habitat of the sage grouse, an endangered species with a range of over 11 million acres across the mountain west. These dubious environmental impacts have been holding up efforts to develop a domestic supply chain for lithium, the key critical mineral input that is needed to manufacture all the batteries that are supposed to save the pool fish and wild buckwheat and sage grouse from climate change.

Or consider the fate of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, which its owner, Pacific Gas and Electric, proposed to shutter due to state environmental rules that would have required it to build a multibillion dollar cooling tower to avoid fish larvae entrainment from the sea water intakes that have cooled the plant for the last 40 years. There has been no evidence of any decline in local fish populations over that period. The state’s environmental regulators had simply made a dubious estimate of how much larvae would be entrained, based on a census of the density of larvae in surrounding waters, and then extrapolated that into an even more dubious estimate of the impact that the intakes were having on local fisheries, despite a complete lack of evidence that the plant had had any impact whatsoever on actual fishery populations. This, then, became the ostensible regulatory justification for imposing billions of dollars of new environmental regulatory costs upon the largest source of clean electricity in the state of California, leading to its planned closure. Only after it became clear that the state would have a difficult time either keeping the lights on or hitting its climate targets did the state’s Democratic leaders reverse course on this absurd journey down the environmental regulatory rabbit hole, a decision that the state’s powerful environmental community continues to monolithically oppose.

So this, it would appear, is in significant part what those 30,000 environmental lawyers have been up to for the last generation. Either promulgating rules like these, litigating them, or helping governments, businesses, and property owners comply with them. And as I look out at this remarkable room of ambitious and talented legal minds, I have to ask whether this has been a particularly good use of those talents and the enormous resources that institutions such as this one have invested in training them?

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What Will You Build?

My answer to that last question, obviously, is no. But I would be remiss in offering this sort of provocation without suggesting what I think you all ought to be doing with those talents instead. So let me close with some thoughts about what really does matter for the environment and where it is that the environmental movement and environmental law needs to go from here.

First, the single most important thing to understand, in my view, about ecological politics and policy in the 21st century is that the big challenges are generative, not restrictive. Problems like climate change and biodiversity loss are global and solving them requires building a new world, not preserving the old one. Similarly, the new ecological problems won’t be solved in the old ways that worked so well for the environmental movement in the 60s and 70s. Climate change is not simply a big air pollution problem that we can regulate or tax out of existence. And biodiversity loss won’t be solved by drawing a circle around the Amazon or the Siberian Taiga in the way that earlier conservation efforts created national parks and other protected areas.

If you want to stop climate change, you need to build an entire new energy economy capable of providing far more energy to meet the needs of 8 billion people globally, most of whom want to live modern lives just like all of us do. This is not optional. China, India, and other emerging economies are not waiting for our permission to develop. And if you want to protect global biodiversity, you need to figure out how to produce food for 8 billion people who want to eat higher on the food chain, which means producing more food on less land so that we don’t convert more of our forests, wetlands, and grasslands into agriculture.

So the question for the environmental law profession over the coming decades, in my view, is not what will you stop but what will you build? This, then, leads to a second key question, which is what parts of the enormous environmental regulatory edifice that we have built up in this country are you ready to get rid of so that we can build that world?

There is a lot of concern in the environmental law community that in the rush to reform environmental laws like NEPA and the Endangered Species Act, we will throw out the baby with the bathwater. And my response to those concerns is that if you want them to be taken seriously, you need to be ready to say what you are willing to get rid of. Which part is the baby and which part is the bathwater. There must be something, some significant part of the environmental legal canon that has been built up over the last 50 years, that is no longer fit for purpose and can be dispensed with.

Of course, it may already be too late for the environmental legal community to choose. The Trump administration and the Supreme Court are already well on their way to eviscerating much of the environmental legal canon, wiping out fifty years of legal precedent, administrative law, and regulatory guidance, and emptying the federal bureaucracy of much of the institutional knowledge and expertise necessary to keep the massive federal environmental regulatory enterprise humming along. This is a huge challenge to the ancien regime. Even if Democrats sweep back into power in 2028, it is not at all clear that it will be possible, much less desirable, to put the legacy green regulatory paradigm back together again.

But it is also an enormous opportunity for a new generation of legal scholars and practitioners. After Trump and his MAGA shock troops clean out environmentalism’s Augean stables, there will be a void to fill. Forward thinking environmental lawyers should be thinking now about how they will build a new federal environmental regulatory regime largely from scratch, one that is fit for purpose, that supports innovation and follows technological change rather than attempting to force it, and that builds instead of restricts.

In closing, I want to remind you all that while politics and policy are important, the big long term drivers of environmental progress are macroeconomic and technological, not political or regulatory. As I noted earlier, before any of those foundational laws had been passed, the air and water in the post-war era was already far cleaner than it had been in earlier decades because an increasingly prosperous society was building all sorts of infrastructure for all sorts of reasons that brought environmental benefits along for the ride. Better technologies were making industry, space heating, and all sorts of other activities more efficient and profitable, as well as being less damaging to the environment.

The same is true today of carbon emissions. The long-term carbon intensity of both the US and global economies has been falling at a consistent rate since long before anyone had ever heard of climate change. That is in part due to public policies, particularly public investments in new energy technologies. But many of those policies were undertaken for reasons having not much to do with climate change.

When I was a young activist and advocate, I found this idea distasteful, even identity threatening. The whole reason I got into environmental politics was to change the world. The notion that things had gotten better, environmentally and otherwise, for reasons having nothing to do with the sacred acts of protest, organizing, advocacy, and litigating seemed to challenge the entire point of what I was doing.

My older self sees all that differently. The flowering of environmental concern, activism, and ultimately lawyering in the early 1970s brought a one time bonanza, accelerating trends that were already underway. There was lots of low hanging pollution fruit to capture at very low cost. But the environmental movement learned the wrong lessons from those early successes, overindexed on legal and regulatory strategies, and built an enormous legal and political infrastructure to prosecute those strategies to increasingly little effect.

My point is not to encourage you to abandon environmental activism, policy, or legal efforts all together. But it is to urge a bit more humility and a lot less technocratic hubris. Environmental law and policy succeeds when it swims with the far more powerful currents of modernization, development, economic growth, and technological innovation. When it positions itself oppositionally to those trends, it fails. Growth, development, and technological change are both the source of and solution to environmental challenges. Environmental law must place itself in service of those processes in order to serve the environment.

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Last month, I attended a debate between Oren Cass and Matt Yglesias at Abundance 2025 titled “Is Abundance Just Neoliberalism?” The conversation was wide ranging. But for me, the most interesting discussion came right at the top. Cass opened by suggesting that,

“[F]or purposes of this discussion, instead of using the word abundance, we use the word stuff. Yes. We could use more stuff, better stuff, but I think it would help to separate the actual useful concepts from the marketing if we focus less on how nice it sounds and more on what it is actually talking about, which is simply consumption is good, more consumption would be better, and I would simply suggest that if there is one thing we have gotten a lot of since 1980, it is stuff, and we need more stuff, as the diagnosis of our problems is unlikely to get us where we need to go.”

Marshall Kosloff, the moderator of the debate and an Abundance partisan, pushed back a bit. “So before I go to Matt real quick,” Kosloff interjected, “I just want to push you on something. What I don’t like about stuff is it suggests that there’s a consumerist [sic]. If we had an abundance of toys, if we had an abundance of like X, Y, and Z, everything would be better. But I think if you listen to the conversations this morning, we’re focused on housing, we’re focused on energy, like things more tangible than stuff. So I’d just be curious how you think about that.”

“Well, you might say things less tangible than stuff,” Cass responded, “but those are all, of course, forms of stuff. If you want to use things... I’ll take that. I’ll defend things. Things it is. More things, better things, large things, fast things, all acceptable.” Cass goes on, later, to argue that the focus on housing, energy, infrastructure, and the like is nothing new. Clinton, Obama, even his old boss Mitt Romney, focused on these things in the neoliberal era. Yglesias largely agreed, arguing that policy-makers have endeavored to deliver more of these goods for decades for good reason. The fact that these goods have long been a fixation does not make them any less important, even if there is nothing particularly new about it.

The conversation went on to cover many adjacent topics, from tariffs to predistribution. But I personally found both Cass’ and Yglesias’ treatment of the question unsatisfying. Clearly the point of the Abundance movement is not the production of more trinkets. Nor is it the case that Cass actually has a problem with trinket consumption. To the contrary, Cass’s concern is not actually that Americans consume too many trinkets but that they produce too few. Cass has been supportive of the Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs and efforts to reverse America’s trade imbalance.

So if not trinkets, what, exactly, are Cass and Yglesias arguing about? On one level, both are arguing about how best to assure Americans more purchasing power. Yglesias defends free trade and criticizes tariffs because he argues that the former brings a range of cheap consumer goods that benefit all Americans while the latter raises prices for all Americans while only raising wages for the small minority of workers in the trinket business. Cass argues that while this approach has buoyed American consumers’ ability to purchase trinkets, it has also marginalized America’s working class in a variety of other ways economically.

This is also an old debate, not a new one, pitting those who argue that it is better to achieve purchasing power with higher wages and, resultingly, higher prices against those who observe that you can achieve the same end with lower wages and lower prices. Ironically, Yglesias, coming from the center left, takes the latter position and Cass, coming from the center right, takes the former, a reversal of traditional alignment of this argument ideologically.

The debate between these two positions is, in varying ways, adjacent to the abundance debate. But it is not the abundance debate. For that, you need to look to the issues that Kosloff raises—energy, housing, infrastructure, and similar. At the same time, Cass raised important questions about what sort of political agenda might more effectively address the many challenges facing the American project that do not have much to do with either “stuff” or “things”. But while Cass may have a formula for solving all those non-stuff problems, it wasn’t readily apparent across the 90 minutes he spent arguing with Yglesias what they were.

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Abundance = Productivity and Growth

It is not accidental that Kosloff’s “things,” to use Cass’s suggested vocabulary, are the stuff that the abundance movement has focused on. Whether derived from a high wage, high price trinket economy, or a low wage, low price trinket economy, purchasing power doesn’t go that far for most people if energy, housing, and transportation are scarce or expensive. You can outsource trinket production to places where they are cheaper to produce. But you can’t outsource housing or infrastructure construction.

Moreover, whether produced in a high wage high price economy or a low wage low price economy, and whether derived from trinkets or, say, megabits, higher rates of economic growth produce greater surplus to reinvest in public and private infrastructure. Cass’ framing of all this economic activity and growth as mostly involving “stuff” is, ironically given his very different ideological commitments, the same move that a lot of greens make, conflating economic growth with consumerism and material consumption, “toys” as Kosloff (and President Trump) put it, despite the fact that most economic activity, growth, and surplus in modern economies isn’t derived from trinkets of any sort.

To the contrary, economic surplus in the US and other advanced developed economies is overwhelmingly derived from services of one sort or another—health services, professional services, energy services, transportation services, financial services, food services, and so on. All of those services have a material component, the poles and pavement, screens and scanners. But from an economic perspective, the really important stuff is the infrastructure and technology that allows labor to deliver better services more broadly and efficiently, and that, in turn, is ultimately the source of all that economic surplus—multifactor productivity growth, in the parlance of neoclassical economists, being the primary driver of long term economic growth.

Cass reduced this in his remarks to the production of surplus that neoliberals then propose to redistribute, contrasting this with his preference for predistribution. And insofar as predistribution obviates the need for redistribution, a tradeoff between predistribution and economic growth is, perhaps, justifiable. But just as it is not correct to reduce all economic activity and growth to material goods and consumption, it is also not correct to reduce the public uses of economic surplus to redistribution. There are a range of public goods, from biomedical research to roads and bridges to the electrical grid that are in whole or in part dependent on public investment of economic surplus that are not, strictly speaking, redistributive.

This suggests, further, that not all “stuff” is created equal. Reducing it all to trinkets elides distinctions that matter. Potato chips, as the Information Technology Innovation Foundation’s Rob Atkinson has long reminded us, are not the same as computer chips. Even if making potato chips was as profitable for both labor and capital as making computer chips, one is a general purpose technology that brings enormous productivity benefits across the entire economy, the other is, well, a potato chip. You might be fine outsourcing all your potato chip production to a geopolitical rival like China. But you wouldn’t want to outsource all your computer chip production.

Of course, in the peaceful, frictionless, pareto optimized models of neoclassical economists, you can, in fact, outsource all your computer chips and electric vehicles and solar panels to China, and all your oil production to Russia and Saudi Arabia and everything works out just fine. Everybody gets cheap energy and computing, and the multifactor productivity gains that come with them, as well as trinkets and potato chips.

But in this world, outsourcing all the key kit necessary to operate a technologically advanced economy, and not incidentally, fight a modern war, to one’s geopolitical rivals is generally a bad idea. I’m not sure that Yglesias and Cass really disagree very much that tariffs to protect these sectors of a domestic economy, industrial policies to develop them, and subsidies to promote them might sometimes be necessary. They part company on broader application of tariffs and restrictive immigration policies. But both issues are, arguably, marginal to the central debates that surround the abundance movement and its points of departure with opponents on both the right and the left.

In fact, part of what made the debate somewhat unsatisfying for me is that what most distinguishes Yglesias and Cass is the arguments that they have with Democratic and Republican partisans respectively, not with each other. Yglesias is a neoliberal reformer within a center-left political coalition that in recent years has turned away from the New Democrat reform agenda that rescued the party from the political wilderness in the Reagan era. And Cass is a full throated advocate for industrial policy within a Republican Party that, until recently, rejected such measures as fundamentally unAmerican.

If you put those things together, what you actually get is a cross-partisan abundance movement that wants to reform productivity- and innovation-killing regulation, remove self-defeating obstacles to delivering public goods cost-effectively and expeditiously, invest in developing and commercializing transformative technology, and assure that America remains at the cutting edge of geopolitically important economic sectors. And while both Yglesias and Cass have other fish to fry with each other, I doubt that either of them would much disagree that any of the above is important and necessary.

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What About the Non-Stuff Stuff?

When all was said and done, I thought that the various disagreements that Cass and Yglesias ventilated about classical economic theory were far less interesting than Cass’ core critique, both because it gets at the issues that are arguably defining the American political landscape at the moment and because he didn’t appear to have any better answer to those problems than did Yglesias. There was a moment at the end of the panel that really crystallized this for me and spoke to the limits of both the abundance discourse and a particular category of criticism of it. Cass returns to his theme from the beginning. What is really different about all this abundance talk than what Obama and Clinton were up to? And he uses the example of an Obama advertisement from the 2012 campaign:

“The Life of Julia question is a fascinating one for folks who did not have the pleasure of following politics in 2012. The Obama campaign put out this wonderful little illustration of how their policies would, in fact, you know, cover the cost of Julia’s preschool, then make sure she goes to a good school. Her mom has support to go back to something else and get a degree. She graduates and then gets help being able to buy a house, and then has some support for her kid, and then she retires to tend a community garden.

And I guess just the question is, would we say that Julia lived an abundant life? I think back to the start of Ezra and Derek’s book with the narrative of the person waking up in 2050. They are cooled by renewable energy and the drone drops off the star pills and so forth. It has a sort of life of Julia vibe in that it is describing what seems like a very pleasant life, certainly, without engaging in any of the concerns I at least have for the ways that our politics and economics have failed to consider what besides an easy life and ensuring that you have lots of everything is in fact core to to human flourishing. So I don’t know, what does abundance think of Life of Julia? Is she living an abundant life or are there concerns with that model?”

This is Cass’ primary criticism of the Abundance movement as far as I can tell and it is arguably the central question that all post-industrial societies across the West are struggling to answer. After the end of scarcity, at a moment when virtually everyone in advanced developed economies has enough “stuff,” what is the point of life? What is a nation’s purpose? Steve Bannon, some years ago, opined that the nation needed a good war. Something to fight for. National conservatives offer family, faith, and country. Greta Thunberg has acknowledged that her climate strikes and activism were in part a strategy to escape severe depression in her early adolescence. The pro-Abundance techno-libertarians suggest that pro-natalism is the answer.

Abundance on this front is unsatisfying precisely because it gives a small-l liberal answer to that question, which is that the job of government and public policy is not to provide meaning in people’s lives but to provide people with the means to find whatever sort of meaning they choose—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the resources and agency to make whatever sort of life they want, so long as it doesn’t infringe upon anyone else’s ability to do the same. That’s a lot more than trinkets. But it falls far short of the “human flourishing” that Cass is looking for. Having the ability to pursue meaning and purpose in one’s life is no guarantee one will find it. For the small-l liberal, the actual meaning making is private, not public, business.

But is that enough? The original neoliberals—Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith and Montesquieu—were great believers in market economies, private property, the propensity to truck, barter, and trade, and limited government because, after centuries of religious wars that had raged across Britain and the European continent, they believed that replacing the religious passions with economic self-interest was a recipe for not only prosperity but peace. Capitalism and private property, enabled by a limited sovereign, made possible economic autonomy and mutually beneficial transaction. Everybody didn’t have to like everyone else, worship the same god, or hold the same definition of a good life. They just needed the freedom to pursue their own version of it.

But three centuries later, in late modern, advanced industrialized economies, the passions are back. In the trinket sense, we all have enough stuff. What we fight over materially are mostly status and positional goods. Not who has enough but who has what and how much.

More broadly, in the absence of material scarcity, the political sphere becomes a screen upon which to project identity and meaning—passions, not interests. As a result, the stakes in politics become materially lower but psychically higher. Politics becomes zero sum not because there is not enough stuff to go around but because prevailing on these questions, that revolve not around material concerns so much as what makes a good life and a great country, and who deserves to be part of it, seemingly requires defeating those who define those things differently.

Cass’s predistribution, in one sense, is a material proxy for the ways in which the new Republican party proposes to select new political winners. Predistribution, in this context, is arguably the wonkier, more academic version of President Trump’s cruder efforts to tilt the benefits of federal largesse and policy toward the constituencies that elected him—red state, working class, non-college educated, and rural voters—and away from those that opposed him—blue state, coastal, college educated, and urban.

And while there is a strong argument that the latter have benefitted disproportionately from the neoliberal era, it’s also not clear to me how predistribution via tariffs, immigration restrictions, higher wages, and higher prices actually addresses the question that Cass keeps asking. What, besides an easy life and more stuff after all, does Cass’ alternative to neoliberalism offer Joey, who now works in a booming trinket factory in a revitalized midsized city in the industrial midwest and earns a better wage thanks to restrictive immigration and tariffs, that Obama-era neoliberalism didn’t offer Julia?

Joey and Julia both now live an abundant life. But I’m not sure how any of this might reasonably address the other things that are core, as Cass puts it, to human flourishing. Indeed, insofar as predistribution and other non-neoliberal theories of economic distribution are intended to level up and assure that those left behind in the neoliberal era achieve similar levels of comfort, affluence, and agency as those who benefited from the prior era, those policies should arguably be expected to make the existential crises of post-industrial, post-scarcity economies worse, not better—ease of life and a surfeit of stuff being, ostensibly, the cause of the problem.

If more stuff is the problem, then neither Yglesias’ neoliberalism nor Cass’ alternative offer much of a solution. Joey and Julia will both end up addicted to booze, drugs, gambling or porn in an effort to fill the void created by living a comfortable life devoid of struggle, meaning, or purpose. Or rage tweeting about the collapse of western civilization or the looming climate apocalypse or oligarchs or gender therapy or Palestine. Or, for that matter, the neoliberal “billionaire-financed” Abundance movement.

And even were it true that scarcity, struggle, and hardship were the answer to the various crises of meaning, loneliness, and purpose that too often plague citizens in affluent economies, democratic polities are typically not inclined to impose those conditions upon themselves, whether under the guise of national greatness, degrowth, a climate emergency, or something else, at least not intentionally. We aren’t going back to the culture, community, and collectivism of older forms of social and economic organization. Even if we could, you don’t get that lost culture and community back without bringing poverty and precarity, provincialism, and patriarchy along for the ride in ways that most people have, historically, found to be stifling, not revelatory.

Ultimately, you can’t put the modernization genie back in the bottle. We become different beings after modernization than before. For this reason, a lasting solution to the psychic and spiritual dislocations and crises of modernity will need to go through post-modernity and post-scarcity rather than attempting to undo them. In the face of material abundance, imposing limits and boundaries volitionally is healthy and good. Imposing them externally, unwillingly, or from above is a recipe for both passivity and abuse. One requires and nurtures what psychologists call an internal locus of control, the other imposes an external locus of control. Creating the conditions for the former and resisting demands for the latter is, in my view, what the Abundance movement ought to strive for. Abundance, autonomy, and agency, in this sense, are the worst solutions to our post-modern malaise except for all the others.

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A year ago, I took a public stand in opposition to the confirmation of Matthew Marzano to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. To his advocates, Marzano brought unique qualifications to the position. He was a trained nuclear engineer who had worked as a reactor operator. For me and other opponents, he was a young Senate staffer with a few years of training and experience in the industry and very little policy-making or management experience. He had also led opposition to a key provision of the ADVANCE Act directing the NRC to modernize its mission to enable the benefits of nuclear energy to society, a key litmus test for genuine efforts to reform the agency.

Marzano was ultimately confirmed on a straight party-line vote in the dying days of the lame duck Congress last December, the first commissioner ever confirmed without a single vote from the opposition party in the history of the commission. Since then, the polarization of Congressional politics around commission appointments and business has only gotten worse.

In January, the chair under President Biden, Christopher Hanson, refused to resign from the commission, as his predecessor Kathleen Svinicki had, to allow the newly elected President, who has made nuclear energy a key part of his energy dominance agenda, a working majority on the commission. Instead, Hanson stayed on the commission, positioning himself in a speech in March at the NRC’s annual Regulatory Insights Conference as a fierce defender of NRC independence. Hanson’s obstinance became a self-fulfilling prophecy in May when President Trump asserted his authority over the commission and removed him. Then, in July, the current chair, David Wright—despite being a popular sitting commissioner with a demonstrated track record of both independence and working well with commissioners of both parties—was opposed by the entire Democratic Senate Caucus, in protest of Trump’s removal of Hanson.

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The descent of commission politics into the same polarization that has consumed the rest of our body politic is, perhaps, not surprising. But it is not great news for nuclear energy, which in recent years has defied the odds and managed to stay, mostly, above the partisan fray.

So in service of defending the bipartisan consensus in support of nuclear energy and an NRC commission that operates based on evidence, merit, and the national interest and not ideological or partisan commitments, I want to say for the record that Matt Marzano has proven to be a much better commissioner than I feared. It is early days. But he clearly cares deeply about the technology and its future. He has acknowledged that he was wrong to oppose the mission modernization mandate in the ADVANCE Act, making a strong case for mission modernization in his vote for a revised mission statement that went well beyond the very limited revision proposed by the agency’s office of general counsel. He brings useful knowledge of nuclear technology to the commission.

To his credit, he reached out to me within hours of being confirmed to say that he wouldn’t hold a grudge and his door was open to my colleagues and I, a commitment that he has kept. I note that not just because I appreciate the gesture personally but because it speaks to personal character that cannot be quantified on a CV. It also stands in stark contrast to several of his current and former Democratic colleagues on the commission, for whom any criticism of the agency, much less personal criticism, was too often viewed as an assault upon the agency’s independence and integrity.

I note all of that also because President Trump has now nominated another commissioner, and against a lot of fear that he planned to stack the commission with flunkies, ideologues, and bomb-throwers, he has nominated a remarkably qualified and experienced candidate. If you liked the idea of having Marzano, a nuclear engineer and graduate of the nuclear navy with a background in science and engineering, not politics, on the commission, you should love the idea of confirming Ho Nieh.

Nieh too is a nuclear engineer and veteran of the nuclear navy. He served two decades in a variety of leadership roles at the NRC, including Director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation (NRR) and Chief of Staff to Commissioner William Ostendorff. He was well known within the building as a reformer and innovator. And his advocacy within the NRC for regulatory modernization ran well ahead of the changes that have slowly begun to take hold at the agency in the last few years.

After Congress passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (NEIMA) in 2019, directing the NRC to prioritize modernized, risk-informed regulation, and five years before Congress would take the further step of directing the NRC to modernize its mission to enable the safe use of nuclear energy, Nieh unilaterally revised the mission of the NRR, sending a memo to all staff in the division announcing that henceforth the division’s purpose would be to “make safe use of nuclear technology possible.”

This is the sort of statement that to an outsider seems nothing short of banal. Of course the objective of a nuclear regulator should be to enable the safe utilization of clean, reliable energy in the public interest! But in the insular world of the NRC bureaucracy, these words were earth-shaking and controversial, despite clear Congressional direction to modernize the agency and accelerate licensing of advanced reactor technology.

The whole memo is worth reading. It largely anticipates the multiple debates about what real reform at the agency would need to look like in order to serve the nation’s interest as efforts to commercialize a new generation of reactor technology ramped up and often foundered upon the shoals of the NRC’s sclerotic regulatory norms and practices. Nieh’s effort, unsurprisingly, sparked backlash at both the staff and commission level. I can’t confirm it but it has long been rumored that he was forced out in 2021 by a cabal of commissioners who felt that he was pushing too hard for change at the NRR.

Since he left the NRC, Nieh has played an important role in getting new nuclear technology deployed in the private sector, working for Southern Company to oversee regulatory compliance as the company brought the first new US reactors in decades on line.

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So the nomination of Nieh will be a test for Congress, and especially Senate Democrats. If competence, independent judgement, technical merit, a deep knowledge of how America’s nuclear regulatory bureaucracy presently operates, and of how it needs to change, matters at all, the Senate will confirm Nieh by a large, bipartisan majority. If Senate Democrats are determined to embody the resistance to all things Trump, even when the vote in question is for exactly the thing that Democrats have demanded—independent, highly qualified leadership at the NRC committed to the safe operation and development of nuclear power—then it will likely come down to a party line vote.

Here’s hoping that wisdom, bipartisanship, and better angels prevail and Democrats are able to put aside their not unjustified concerns about the Trump presidency to confirm a candidate whose qualifications, temperament, and track record as a regulator, corporate leader, and innovator are impeccable. Now more than ever, America needs a next generation nuclear industry, capable of meeting the nation’s growing need for clean, firm, and reliable generation to power rapidly growing electricity demand and compete for global markets.

After a generation of conflict over the role of nuclear energy in the nation’s future energy system, both parties largely agree that it must be a top priority. Achieving that future will require leadership at the NRC that is both highly competent and visionary. The nation couldn’t ask for a better leader on both fronts than Ho Nieh. At a moment of rising polarization and conflict across the political spectrum, here is one small corner of the federal enterprise where Congress can strike a blow for unity and comity in the national interest.

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In Part I of this series, we described the conquest of the old materialist Left in the post-war era. In Part II, we break down how the effort to transform Marx from modernization theorist to degrowther presaged broader center-left political debates about capitalism, biophysical limits to human aspirations, and the nature of social, political, and economic modernization. In Part III, we offer a very different reading of Marx. Were he alive today, he would almost certainly be an ecomodernist, not a degrowther, ecological economist, and perhaps not even a communist.

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Beyond Marx’s very limited writing about agriculture and even more limited discussion of metabolism, the effort to recast Marx as an ecological thinker and opponent of modernity requires a willful disregard for Marx’s broader theory of history. Marx was, arguably, the first modernization theorist. Without moving much of the population off of the land and into cities, and out of agriculture and into industry, there could be no proletariat. The metabolic rift, such as it was, was an inevitable result of this process. Without it, there could be no capital accumulation, no large working class, no rationalization of commodities and production such that workers might seize control of it.

Both capitalism and the metabolic rift are necessary stages of human development for Marx. Without them, there is no history, only feudalism. Post-capitalism, in other words, is not possible without capitalism, and not in a perfunctory way. Capitalism’s dynamism and productivism is necessary to rationalize and reorganize productive forces. Only once that has happened can the working class, liberated from the land and the feudal social and economic arrangements associated with agrarian life, become a revolutionary force.

In fact, the history of revolutionary Marxist regimes, in Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, all to varying degrees point to the catastrophic consequences of attempting to leapfrog capitalism and go straight to post-capitalism. All collectivized peasant agriculture while attempting to force industrialization via state fiat, to disastrous effect for many who endured it and, not incidentally, the environment as well.

By contrast, and against claims that capitalism in wealthy industrialized countries has avoided immiserating the Western working classes only by robbing the global periphery of wealth and resources, the spread of global trade, markets, and productive forces to the periphery has coincided with dramatic improvements of living standards and human material well being, from life expectancy to educational attainment to food security, most especially among the global poor.

That period corresponds not incidentally with the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s embrace of state capitalism and global trade. The global economy remains deeply inequitable. But the floor for virtually all has improved significantly, suggesting perhaps, to paraphrase Joan Robinson, that the only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism.

In the advanced developed economies, meanwhile, increasingly social forms of capitalism, as James O’Connor would have it, have not only assured that workers would benefit from a greater share of capitalist surplus but increasingly shifted control over the means of production to workers. Even in the famously unequal United States, workers own a substantial share of the stock market, primarily through retirement plans as well as taxable investment accounts. 66% of US households own their homes. Redistributive tax and transfer programs have actually substantially reduced the income gap between those at the bottom and those at the median of the income distribution, even as incomes at the top have taken off. And even income growth at the top of the distribution has largely been driven by wages, not rents, among top earners in the service and knowledge professions.

Government spending, meanwhile, now accounts for over 40% of GDP in the United States, higher in most other advanced developed economies. Third sector spending—universities, social agencies, and other non-profits—accounts for a further 10%. 25% of Americans work in either the public or non-profit sectors. Another 10% are self-employed. If you want to know why the Left has largely abandoned faith that the industrial proletariat might lead the way to a revolutionary post-capitalist order, consider that about as many Americans today work in the non-profit sector as in manufacturing.

Viewed as a dialectical and emergent phenomenon, not as a radical or revolutionary break, in other words, advanced post-industrial societies have evolved in ways not so different than Marx imagined they would. 150 years of contradictions and crises have transformed capitalism into something profoundly different than what it was in Marx’s day. The mixed economies of the West have proven adept at distributing surplus sufficiently to assure that workers can afford to be consumers of capitalist production. Against the claims of O’Connor and John Bellamy Foster, there is little evidence that a second contradiction of capitalism has much constrained the profitability of capital, despite the presence of an increasingly baroque environmental regulatory state and notwithstanding breathless forecasts of impending disaster fueled economic calamities due to climate change.

Insofar as there are new class conflicts and contradictions in late capitalist societies driving history forward, it would appear to be neither the conflict between capital and labor, nor between materialism and ecology, but rather between the working and knowledge classes—between those with college educations and those without, those still involved in the production of material goods and services and those fully ensconced in the knowledge economy, those in the private sector and those in the public and non-profit sectors that capitalism’s surplus makes possible. These new class conflicts cut across the old distinctions between capital and labor and instead divide both capital and labor, with owners, managers, and workers who produce economic surplus in the private sector increasingly arrayed together against those who live off its rents in the public and non-profit sectors.

Today, this new divide represents a third contradiction of capitalism. Public policies and social forms of production that distribute both private surplus and public goods broadly across late capitalist societies have produced a growing class of rentiers, managers, and workers alienated not only from the means of material production but from the material economy itself. Capitalism produces such wealth and abundance that a growing share of the population becomes detached from the material processes and productive forces that allow for its reproduction.

It is this contradiction and crisis that is today, across the West, roiling the social, political, and economic order that has defined Western political economy since the end of the second World War. The fault lines aren’t neat or tidy. But they define the politics of most Western democracies today. Political alignment today runs along the contours of education, private sector employment, and involvement with sectors of the economy that still produce material goods. If it can be said that there is a rift, it is not between humans and nature but between the new post-material knowledge class and the material metabolism of capitalism itself.

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The Third Contradiction of Capitalism

The new divide challenges the old materialist Left as well as the new post-Marxist Left. The organized industrial proletariat has long been a shrinking force in advanced economies, and not simply due to the predations of capitalists. Increasing labor productivity has shrunk employment in industrial sectors of advanced economies. This has not resulted in mass technological unemployment, as both Marx and many of the classical economists he criticized imagined. Material output continues to grow, albeit more slowly than in earlier periods. But labor, freed today from industrial production, as it was in Marx’s time from agricultural production, has been absorbed by massively expanded knowledge and service sectors in all of the advanced economies. 80% or more of both employment and economic output in advanced economies today occurs in those sectors of the economy.

A post-industrial leftism, then, would seem to offer more promising possibilities. In societies where material sufficiency, if not abundance, is assured for virtually all, an egalitarian politics decoupled from material need might, in theory, reorient itself around ecological concerns. But where material interests offered the old Left a mechanism capable of organizing class interests in a way that was both universalizing and disciplining, post-material politics offers no similar mechanism.

Once advanced economies successfully address industrial pollution in extremis—river fires, smothering air pollution, and the like—environmental policies frequently impose costs upon either production or consumption that often hit working class households the hardest, in pursuit of environmental and public health benefits that are, under the best of circumstances, not so stark as to make those benefits obviously worth pursuing. The tradeoffs associated with climate mitigation are even worse. It may be the case that the impacts of climate change will fall hardest upon the poor, but climate policy also often impacts working class constituencies the most, promising higher cost energy, transportation and consumer goods in the present in exchange for uncertain climate benefits decades in the future.

In response, an elite leftism grounded in the academy has weaponized scholarship, scientizing green ideological, cultural, and aesthetic demands as ecological necessities. It is here that the Left, long the enemy of Malthus and subsequent attempts to impose external limits upon the aspirations of the working classes, abandoned that faith, substituting global ecological limits for universalist and class-based material

demands and insisting that the working classes must subordinate their material interests to hard biophysical realities that, definitally, can brook no dissent.

Saito, Foster, and their cohort at The Monthly Review predictably embrace the planetary boundary thesis—arguing that looming ecological collapse requires an eco-socialist future without large-scale agriculture, abundant energy, or mass consumption. In a telling recent exchange with Foster, the Marxist scholar David Harvey rejects Foster’s efforts to base his new-fangled ecosocialism upon neo-malthusian and naturalized claims of planetary boundaries, arguing, as leftists from Marx onwards have, that these have always been tools that elites use to deny power, agency, and resources to the working class and the poor. In response, Foster simply restates his claim that ecological limits are established, unimpeachable science while defending long debunked works, such as Paul Erhlich’s Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report, that have inspired exactly the regressive and unjust responses from elites that Harvey warns off.

In any event, the effort to convince the working classes that looming planetary environmental crises require that they subordinate their material aspirations to ostensibly unbending ecological limits has not gone well. The college educated Left today insists that the working classes must forego material consumption that ecoleftists deem unnecessary. But necessity and sufficiency are ultimately in the eyes of the beholder. Whether working class and rural French motorists can afford to pay higher fuel taxes or Dutch farmers can survive economically while raising fewer animals or working class Hispanic men need “big ass trucks,” is largely beside the point. Popular sentiment rules and efforts from both the reformist and radical Left to reorient popular politics around ecological concerns have broadly failed almost everywhere, consistently ceding working class constituencies, and the balance of power, to the populist Right.

In the post-war era, assuring that all were able to meet their material needs and live and work in dignity was a political project capable of sustaining a broad majoritarian politics for the Left. Attempting to codify what constitutes “enough” and impose that upon the population, by contrast, offers no similar possibility for a broad, inclusive, or class-based politics. Once material necessities have been met for most or all in advanced developed economies, politics becomes, unavoidably, a competition of which political faction can best align its objectives and agenda with the values and aspirations of the working and middle classes, including their aspirations to consume more.

Whether under the guise of carrying capacity, planetary boundaries, limits to growth, or climate targets—the effort to constrain the material aspirations of the working classes is a recipe for driving them out of the center-left political coalition. The defilement of Marx by the ecosocialists, in this way, is exactly analogous to the capture of the Democratic Party and center left politics by the environmental movement more broadly. The working class has no interest in being told how much is enough. Whether under the banner of abundance, liberalism, or leftism, the center-left will have no future so long as environmentalists retain substantial power within that coalition.

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Last January, in the Wall Street Journal, we argued that efforts to preserve the whole of the Inflation Reduction Act were both bad policy and politically doomed. Republicans had run against the IRA and needed to cut trillions of dollars to finance the extension of tax cuts established during the first Trump administration. One way or another, they were going to take a pound of flesh and it behooved climate and clean energy advocates to get clear about what in the IRA was worth saving.

We also argued that there was plenty of fat to cut. The vast majority of IRA spending was flowing towards mature technologies—wind, solar, and electric vehicles—that were well established in electricity and automotive markets. Preserving IRA money for these technologies wouldn’t appreciably change their trajectory, or the trajectory of US carbon emissions, which have been falling at a consistent rate for decades.

Rather, the main obstacles to continuing growth of those technologies are not primarily their direct costs, which continue to fall, but a range of well understood challenges associated with integrating these very different technologies into the legacy electricity and transportation sectors—permitting, transmission, and intermittency in the former case, range and charging infrastructure in the latter.

This message was not well received by many climate and clean energy advocates. They believed that the Biden administration’s clever Green Vortex strategy, which overwhelmingly directed clean tech spending toward Republican districts, might insulate wind, solar, and EV tax credits politically and accused us of “negotiating with ourselves.” Forever subsidies for wind, solar, and electric vehicles, moreover, were necessary because the future of the climate hung in the balance.

In reality, we weren’t negotiating with ourselves. We’ve long argued that public subsidies should support early stage commercialization of clean energy technologies and should phase out as those technologies achieve traction in energy and transportation markets. The point of clean tech industrial policy should be to make clean energy cheap in real, unsubsidized terms, not to prop up uncompetitive technologies in perpetuity.

Nor did the fate of the climate, or even US emissions, hang in the balance. Groups like Energy Innovation and Princeton’s Net Zero America that had promoted the legislation produced modeling purporting to show dire consequences if Trump were elected and repealed the IRA. But well before Trump and Republican majorities gutted it, the IRA was underperforming its promised emissions benefits while costing far more than initially estimated. In reality, emissions over the short and medium term were always likely to converge toward the long-term historic US decarbonization rate with or without the IRA. What will matter over the longer term are nascent technologies necessary for further progress: long duration energy storage, advanced nuclear energy, geothermal, and industrial decarbonization.

As it happened, the final package broadly comported with our political analysis. A handful of EV, battery, and solar assembly factories in Republican districts were not going to sidetrack tax, fiscal, and energy policy priorities that were far more important to the Republican coalition. The key fights that were there to be won were to preserve policy support for nuclear, carbon capture, geothermal and other nascent technologies in the face of the opposition from the Freedom Caucus’ fiscal hawks, along with beating back a last minute effort to tax wind and solar energy production.

If it had stopped there, we’d be taking a victory lap today. High-priority programs to promote nuclear, geothermal, energy storage and similar were not only preserved but extended through 2035. The sunsetting of wind and solar subsidies gave Democrats strong incentives to work with Republicans on permitting reform. And there was substantial demand in Congress to develop domestic critical mineral supply chains, and provide sufficient support for the commercialization of next generation nuclear energy technologies.

In place of the Biden administration’s whole of government climate obsession, you could almost convince yourself that federal energy policy was swinging back toward the successful all of the above energy policies that held sway across both the Obama administration and the first Trump administration—to the benefit of both America’s economic performance and its impressive decarbonization over the last two decades.

But, of course, it hasn’t ended there. The Trump administration has now borrowed a page from the Biden playbook, answering Democrats’ punitive approach towards fossil fuel and mining projects by turning the formidable administrative powers of the executive branch against wind and solar energy development. That effort has not only endangered clean energy production that America needs to meet rising demand in the short term, but has also substantially reduced the likelihood that Congress will get very far in efforts to reform permitting and other outdated environmental laws that now stand in the way of energy development of all kinds.

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Polarization Trumps Green Pork

The green vortex strategy was, in one sense, an effort to build a durable bipartisan political base for the clean energy economy. By directing enormous public funding for clean energy manufacturing and production toward Republican and right-leaning congressional districts, the idea was that the representatives of these districts would have strong political incentives to support clean energy policies and subsidies whether they were Democrats or Republicans and whichever party controlled Congress and the executive branch. And perhaps, had Kamala Harris squeaked out a victory last November, four more years of public investment in these programs would have proven that strategy out.

But it is also the case that most of these policies already had bipartisan support. A broad swath of Republican politicians had supported tax credits, loan guarantees, ARPA-E, and other policies to support clean energy, electric vehicles, and other clean tech going back to the last years of the George W. Bush administration, including through the first Trump administration. Even as pitched partisan battles over climate science, carbon regulation, and the Paris Agreement intensified, quiet climate policy largely prevailed when it came to energy innovation and investment. But the era of quiet climate policy, it seems, ended with the passage of the IRA, or more precisely, with the fateful determination to enact those policies through a maximalist and entirely partisan budget reconciliation process in the name of historic climate action.

The bet by the Biden administration was that it could use budget reconciliation in the same way that the Obama administration had used the parliamentary procedure to pass the Affordable Care Act. Give the public a valuable benefit and policy-makers would be loath to take it away. Meanwhile, through its implementation, the Administration would use the IRA to make sure that Republican congressional districts benefited from the spending in much the same way that the Pentagon distributed defense production (or pork) widely around the country to assure bipartisan support for defense spending.

But in contrast to the ACA, most households saw little benefit from the IRA. Electricity prices in most places continued to rise and most people remained unconvinced that electric vehicles were a viable option despite the generous subsidies. And while defense spending was broadly supported by both parties in the Cold War era, when the Pentagon built a durable political economy around the military industrial complex, passage of a massive spending package for clean energy on a straight party-line vote in the name of averting a climate apocalypse put a huge partisan target on the IRA and the clean tech economy.

In the age of Donald Trump and an era defined by negative polarization, the results were predictable. Climate polarization swallowed the formerly bipartisan commitments to energy innovation whole, ushering in the fate that we have long warned of: that catastrophism and polarization were a positive feedback loop, imperiling not just conventionally toxic climate policies like carbon taxes and regulations but pragmatic quiet climate policies as well, such as transmission investment, conventional pollution regulations, and energy innovation.

Live By the Electricity Price Sword, Die By the Electricity Price Sword?

In the face of the Trump administration’s full frontal assault on wind and solar, much of the clean energy and climate advocacy community has pivoted, warning today not of looming climate catastrophe but an electricity price apocalypse. For the first time in decades, electricity demand is growing rapidly. Electricity rates are rising around the country. Natural gas production has flatlined. And now, alongside the phase out of subsidies, the Trump administration aims to block the siting of wind and solar projects on public lands and federal waters.

There is a belief among many advocates that Trump and the Republican Party will die by the same electricity price sword that they used so effectively against Biden and the Democratic Party in the last election. The public will blame Trump’s vendetta against wind and solar for the price hike, swinging the mid-term elections to Democrats or, at least, forcing Trump to backtrack in the same way that Biden was forced to reverse course on his administration’s moratorium on oil and gas development on public lands.

This may come to pass. But there are also reasons for skepticism. First, Trump, to a much greater degree than Biden, inherited rising electricity prices. As with the broader issue of inflation, Biden had the bad fortune of taking office just as energy prices were rebounding after the Covid pandemic, a problem that was then made worse by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Biden’s various energy policies were not the main event in the run up of energy prices. But in the context of a lot of other things that were out of his control, policies that seemingly contributed to the problem were bound to get an outsized share of the blame.

Second, it is not yet clear that Trump’s moves against renewable energy will be as politically salient as Biden’s moves against oil and gas. Gasoline prices typically set the template for public perception of energy prices more broadly and Trump has been extremely proactive about encouraging Saudi Arabia and other global producers to increase production, even though this has disadvantaged US oil and gas production.

As a result, while electricity prices are rising, gasoline prices are not. So it is not at all clear either that higher electricity prices will stoke public concern about Trump’s energy policies absent an increase in gasoline prices or that the voters or the public will so easily be convinced to accept a connection between Trump' s assault on wind and solar and electricity prices as they were to accept that Biden’s early moves against fossil fuels were responsible for high gas prices specifically and rising energy prices more generally. Indeed, recent polling suggests that voters are more likely to blame corporations and state governments than the Trump Administration for rising electricity prices.

Finally, the narrative that Democrats and clean energy advocates have begun to tell, about the cancellation of wind and solar projects causing rising electricity prices, is complicated by the widespread perception that wind and solar are responsible for high electricity prices in California and other blue states. This claim is highly contested. Clean energy advocates point to trends in retail electricity prices, for instance, which don’t show a strong correlation with renewable energy penetration.

But whether high retail electricity prices are the result of the costs of transmission, distribution, and other measures necessary to integrate variable renewable generation into electrical grids, wildfires, or just the “blue state model” more broadly, the fact remains that many of the highest profile Democrat-run states, including New York, California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts feature very high electricity prices. This problem is further exacerbated by what has, to date, been Exhibit A in the effort to blame Trump for high electricity prices, which is the repeal of IRA subsidies for wind and solar, which undermines the claim that these electricity sources are cheap, not expensive.

In short, while the Trump administration’s energy agenda may not prove a recipe for either energy abundance or energy dominance, it is not clear that Trump or Republicans will pay a particularly high political price for it, particularly given how polarized the politics of energy, not just climate, has become.

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Electricity Prices Are Too Damn High

Beyond the dueling claims about who is responsible for high electricity prices, what is clear is that energy price, reliability, and security are now the coin of the realm. The decade-long effort to center climate in US energy policy is over.

Yet neither fossil energy-focused Republicans nor renewable energy-focused Democrats are likely to make much headway on electricity prices in the short term. US natural gas production was already at record levels in the last years of the Biden administration. Gas production is expected to tick up a bit more this year but won’t grow remotely fast enough to keep up with demand growth.

Wind and solar, meanwhile, were not coming to the rescue of electricity ratepayers even if Kamala Harris were president and the IRA had not been repealed. Solar generation was growing rapidly even before the passage of the IRA and most current projections foresee strong continuing growth despite the phaseout of subsidies. Wind energy deployment, by contrast, was already flagging, due to rising commodity prices and exorbitant costs for off-shore projects even before the Trump administration’s recent moves against off-shore wind and the repeal of the IRA’s subsidies. Had Harris won the 2024 election instead of Trump, electricity prices would be rising just as rapidly and Republicans would be blaming the IRA for today’s electricity prices, just as they were before the election.

Pitched political battles over electricity generation, moreover, don’t address the source of much of the increase in retail electricity prices. Rather, a substantial portion is associated with the cost of transmission and distribution, which in many places has been rising faster than the cost of wholesale electricity generation.

The costs of maintaining and expanding transmission and distribution owes to many factors, including grid hardening in the face of extreme weather and rising commodity prices, as well as the costs of integrating geographically diffuse intermittent electricity generators like wind and solar. But it is also in significant part an unintended consequence of the effort to restructure and liberalize electricity markets.

Electricity market liberalization has allowed for competitive electricity generation markets and has been good for both the natural gas and wind and solar industries. But it also, by design, pushed utilities out of the electricity generation business. As a result, most utilities around the country now make their money through transmission and distribution, where they still maintain their regulated monopoly status and are still granted a guaranteed profit on top of the cost of building and maintaining transmission and distribution infrastructure.

Unsurprisingly, this has incentivized utilities to build and upgrade a lot more transmission and distribution infrastructure, and those are the costs that in most of the country are rising fastest. Worse, the institutional capacity to plan and coordinate investment for affordability, reliability, and decarbonization has been deeply compromised by a utility landscape that was already highly decentralized, by the many Rube Golbergesque variations of electricity market liberalization, and by the transformation of federal and state energy policy into culture war objects.

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Wicked Electricity

Last spring, Alex declared the era of the climate hawk over, noting that none of the conditions that had allowed climate advocates to believe that climate change could be established as a durable priority for US policymakers over the decade or so before the COVID pandemic any longer obtained. Post-Covid budget deficits, supply chain challenges, and inflation had brought an end to the low interest rates and expansionary fiscal policy that had underwritten public clean energy investments over the previous decade. The post-COVID recovery and huge new demand from data centers reversed a generation of slow energy demand growth, putting upward pressure on electricity prices and making policy tradeoffs between energy costs and clean energy and climate objectives even more toxic politically than they already were. Perhaps most importantly, the election of Donald Trump had put to rest the notion that inexorable demographic trends would allow for sustained Democratic majorities which would prioritize climate policy at the federal level.

This shift appears unlikely to be temporary. Democrats might take back the House or even the Senate in the midterm elections and perhaps they will retake the presidency in 2028. But high interest rates and budget deficits are likely to be with us for a long time. So are high electricity prices. Despite America’s remarkable innovation capacities and energy resource endowments, we do not have the right mix of technologies nor the institutional arrangements nor the political leadership to solve the electricity problem anytime soon.

This will create possibilities for some clean energy technologies. Higher prices and supply constraints are good news for anyone who can get so-called “clean firm” generation technologies commercialized, sited, and built at a competitive price, whether that is advanced nuclear, enhanced geothermal, natural gas with carbon removal, or solar with long-duration battery storage. But the balkanized utility landscape, liberalized electricity markets, and diversity of rent-seeking interests competing for a share of the electricity generation and distribution pie make neither more centralized and rationalized planning of the electricity system nor truly competitive and efficient market based solutions particularly feasible.

We have long written about the wicked nature of climate change, which suffers not merely from polarization but rampant solution-based problem definition, policy-based evidence making, and arbitrary boundary setting. “The expert is also the player in a political game, seeking to promote his private vision of goodness over others,” as Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, the UC Berkeley urban planning professors who first applied the idea of wickedness to policy debates, wrote over 50 years ago. “What comprises problem-solution for one is problem-generation for another.”

America’s electricity landscape is now wicked. The sheer number of conflicting economic and ideological interests make electricity cost and reliability a problem to be managed, not solved. Electricity costs are increasingly salient at a moment when cost of living concerns remain high and yet are not salient enough to discipline political actors and policy making in a nation in which a highly polarized public and even more polarized opinion elites are mostly rich enough to ignore cost of living concerns when they conflict with their ideological priors.

While there is no solving the problem, there are problems to solve. The electricity price crisis is the result of multiple causes, including generation and supply shortfalls; permitting, transmission and interconnection bottlenecks; wildfire mitigation, particularly in the west; and kludgy regulatory and market restructuring that simultaneously socializes the costs of goldplated infrastructure, subsidizes high-volume customers, and simulates competitive generation markets.

Solutions to these problems will look different in liberalized versus traditionally regulated utility markets. They will also look different in different parts of the country. Solutions that work in Texas, with abundant wind, solar, and natural gas resources competing in the most liberalized electricity market in the nation will not look the same as North Carolina or Florida, where vertically integrated monopoly utilities still lean heavily on nuclear and coal, or the Tennessee Valley, where TVA operates a publicly owned system powered predominantly with nuclear and natural gas.

For these reasons, as a matter of both policy and political communication, all-of-the-above energy policy remains both the most robust approach to the wicked and highly differentiated nature of America’s electricity system and, demonstrably, the best political approach. Neither Bill McKibben’s solar liberation nor Trump’s fossil-heavy energy dominance agenda are plausible alternatives.

Back to an All of the Above Future

Democrats and clean energy advocates still have a lot of unlearning to do. We were both struck during our week in DC for Abundance 2025 how hard it was for even moderate, Abundance-pilled Democratic politicians, despite the determination to pivot to electricity cost, to talk about energy and electricity without talking about climate change. They would start off on their talking points, about AI and data centers, the need for more renewable energy and President Trump’s anti-abundance assault on wind and solar, and then they’d veer back to talking about climate change and decarbonization.

This was, perhaps, by design—based on the perception that they still need to signal to environmentalists that they care deeply about climate change. But if so, it is a poor design. When Democrats and clean energy advocates extoll the benefits of renewable energy to keep electricity costs under control, their supporters already know that they care about climate change. By contrast, when they muddle their energy affordability message with talk about climate change and emissions, they end up signalling to everyone else that what they really care about is climate change, not electricity costs.

Climate advocates, for their part, do their partners in the Democratic Party no favors by rebranding conventional green policies as an “energy affordability” strategy. A policy agenda that supports residential rooftop solar while opposing fossil fuel drilling and pipelines will strike voters as an agenda to keep energy prices high, because that’s what it is, notwithstanding talking points about shielding ratepayers from fuel price volatility and promises of solar energy too cheap to meter.

Trump and Republicans may face similar problems by the time the 2026 or 2028 elections come along. But removing subsidies, as they did in the Big Beautiful bill, likely won’t have the same political valence as the Biden Administration’s sweeping gestures towards fossil fuel abolition. That said, blocking wind, solar, and transmission development on public lands may undermine public support for the Trump Administration's energy dominance agenda.

Ultimately, whoever controls the affordability debate is likely to have the upper hand. For Democrats, environmentalists, and clean energy advocates, this represents a “who moved my cheese” moment, where not just talking points and arguments will need to change but the entire basis of clean energy advocacy. Policies to “keep it in the ground” are dead and aren’t coming back. The conflation of policies to make clean energy cheap with perpetual subsidies for renewable energy has polarized opinion toward what were once popular technologies and undermined claims that these technologies are cheap and hold the key to lower electricity prices. Hardest of all, clean energy advocates, not just Democrats, will need to learn to talk about the benefits that fossil fuels bring to America’s energy and electricity systems, even as they advocate for diversifying away from them.

This will seem new to many. But it is not so new for an older generation of Democrats and environmentalists. It is the language and agenda of the Clinton and Obama administrations, from before the time that the climate hawks seized control of the Democratic Party. It is still the most popular and durable approach to energy affordability and decarbonization, and holds the key to restoring credibility on the energy issue for both Democrats and clean energy advocates.

Quiet climate policy is dead. But all-of-the-above energy policy can rise again.

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In Part I of this series, we described the conquest of the old materialist Left in the post-war era. In Part II, we break down how the effort to transform Marx from modernization theorist to degrowther presaged broader center-left political debates about capitalism, biophysical limits to human aspirations, and the nature of social, political, and economic modernization. In Part III, we offer a very different reading of Marx. Were he alive today, he would almost certainly be an ecomodernist, not a degrowther, ecological economist, and perhaps not even a communist.

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The End of History and The Second Contradiction of Capitalism

It is not coincidental that the effort to rebrand Marx as an environmentalist began roughly contemporaneously with the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. Fukuyama’s famous 1989 essay and 1992 book of the same name are largely remembered today as triumphalist texts, celebrating global American capitalist hegemony. But Fukuyama was not referring to history in the conventional sense but rather in the Hegelian, dialectical way that Marx used the term.

What Fukuyama meant by the end of history was that there would be no “next” stage of history after capitalism, arguing instead that the liberal democracies and mixed economies that characterized the advanced economies of the late 20th century would represent an apotheosis of sorts. The end of history did not mean the end of crises, conflict, and socioeconomic change. The world might fall back into authoritarianism, feudalism, or other older forms of economic and political organization. But the central contradiction of capitalism that Marx had identified, that capitalists would immiserate labor and thereby eviscerate consumer markets for mass produced goods, would be resolved by new evolutions in democratic, market-based, welfare state economies, not a revolutionary new stage of human development.

At a moment when the Soviet Union was collapsing, organized labor was in crisis, and western post-industrial capitalist economies were thriving, Fukuyama’s argument was hard to resist. Indeed, early ecosocialist writing largely conceded his point, at least with regard to the internal contradictions of capitalism. A year before the publication of Fukuyama’s essay, the Marxist sociologist James O’Connor launched the ecosocialist journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism with an introductory essay in which he acknowledged that the contradictions and crises of capitalism would create increasing need for state planning and coordination and “social forms of production” which might resolve capitalism’s internal contradictions but held “only tenuous and ambiguous promises for the possibilities of socialism.”

O’Connor’s doctrinal innovation was to add a new class of contradictions, absent from Marx’s 19th century writings, that he dubbed “the second contradiction of capitalism.” Where the first contradiction was internal to capitalism, the result of the capitalist’s interest in exploiting labor (e.g. the capitalist’s drive to maximally exploit labor makes labor too poor to afford the capitalist’s product), the second contradiction involved an external contradiction—people and natural resources are not produced “capitalistically.” Capitalism cannot conjure more iron or copper or silicon into the world beyond what exists in the earth’s crust. It has no internal mechanism to assure that accumulation of toxic waste or greenhouse gasses does not kill or so deplete its workforce that it cannot continue to produce.

As with the first contradiction, O’Connor recognized that the second contradiction would drive more social forms of production to manage natural resources and pollution. But unlike the first contradiction, where those new forms of production distributed the economic surplus of productive forces more equitably, allowing for more consumption, continuing economic growth, and capitalist profit, the second contradiction only imposed costs upon capitalists. Rising costs from extraction, resource management, and pollution control would, O’Connor argued, increasingly erode capitalists’ profits.

A few years later, John Bellamy Foster, who would become a leading theorist of ecosocialism, would transform O’Connor’s second contradiction into “the absolute general law of environmental degradation under capitalism,” which, according to Foster, “increasingly constitutes the most obvious threat not only to capitalism's existence but to the life of the planet as a whole.” Capitalist production, combined with the second law of thermodynamics, would “maximize the overall toxicity of production.”

O’Connor had been critical of contemporary neomalthusianism and “Club of Rome technocracy,” arguing that such accounts “mangle Marx's theories of historically produced forms of nature and capitalist accumulation and development.” Foster, in contrast, embraced those claims, arguing, against the claims of environmental critics of Marx, that Marx and Engels had implicitly endorsed notions of natural limits to capital accumulation.

The problem, of course, was that neither Marx nor Engels had written anything to this effect. In an effort to reconcile Marx with environmentalism, O’Connor and Foster invented the new ecomarxist doctrine from whole cloth, first a second contradiction of capitalism, then an absolute law of environmental degradation, that were nowhere to be found in the actual writings of Marx or Engels. And so, Foster and his successors would set about scouring Marx’s early writings, appendixes to Capital, and obscure, unpublished texts and notes in order to find passages that supported the new ecomarxist doctrine.

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The Metabolic Rift, or Marxology Gone Wild

By the late 90’s, Foster had seized upon a few sentences in a late chapter of Capital, in which Marx observed that capitalism “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth,” to claim that Marx was quite preoccupied with the planetary consequences of capitalist production. Foster tweaked Marx’s words, which he would henceforth refer to as the “metabolic rift” between capitalist societies and nature. In reality, the metabolic interaction that Marx described was far more prosaic. Agrarian laborers historically replenished the soil they farmed with their own feces and other organic household wastes. With the shift of large rural populations during the industrial revolution from feudal agrarian economic arrangements to the urban, industrialized, wage economy, waste from growing urban populations, distant from the sites of agricultural production, was no longer available for this purpose.

Foster nonetheless suggests that contemporary readers take the passage both metaphorically and literally. Marx, in Foster’s telling, anticipates global environmental catastrophe while never actually anticipating that capitalism would operate at global scales. Soil depletion, according to Foster, was not only a real world effect of capitalist overproduction in Marx’s time but also a metaphor for the collapse of the planetary life support system in our time.

In recent years, Foster’s revisionism has been further updated by thinkers like Kohei Saito, whose popular books Marx in the Anthropocene and Slow Down, reached a wide audience. Unlike Foster, who points to the metabolic rift as an example of where Marx’s thinking on the environment indicates a shift away from prometheanism, Saito argues that the concept of metabolism represents the core of Marx’s critique of capitalism. Marx, according to Saito, was the original degrowther.

For Saito, Marx’s growing appreciation for “metabolism” in his later years was more than a footnote to his broader productivist views. Rather, Saito argues, Marx’s late-career writing marked a fundamental turn away from historical materialism, Marx’s foundational contribution to political economy and social theory. Capitalism, according to Marx, Engels, and many others, would produce the necessary technological and social conditions that could enable a shift to socialist or communist forms of social organization. Marx’s dalliance with soil fertility, in Saito’s telling, instead implied an abandonment of historical materialism and recognition that the “productive forces” of capitalism would have to be fully abandoned. To avoid widening the “metabolic rift” between humans and nature, Marx had in fact concluded that socialism would have to start from scratch.

But, as with Foster’s original “metabolic rift”, Saito’s “uncovering” of Marx’s true environmental colors relies on fragmented notes and texts that are directly contradicted by Marx’s published work during the same period, most notably in Capital, Volume III. The claim that a set of unpublished notes should undercut the fundamental principles of Marx’s thought is truly astounding. But it is also necessary if the objective is to recast Marx as an environmentalist.

Marx’s interest in soil fertility, to be clear, was unquestionably real. Capitalist relations that had taken form over the centuries leading up to Marx’s life and writing took the fruits of agricultural production without a clear pathway to maintaining its productivity, a problem that those who still worked the land had, at the time of Marx’s writing, been unable to solve without resorting to high-cost and scarce inputs like seabird guano.

But throughout all of their major works, Marx and Engels were ambivalent about the ecological harms of the shift from feudalism to capitalism, seeing the disruption of the metabolic interaction between humans and the earth as one element of a much more complicated set of tensions between the growth of revolutionary and productive forces and their immediate negative outcomes on peasants, laborers, and to the least extent, nature.

Marx predictably engages the concept of “metabolism” dialectically alongside relatively promethean and teleological claims about capitalism more broadly. The ecological impacts of capitalist agriculture, urbanization, and other industrial production, then, are a necessary, arguably inevitable, part of capitalism’s growth as a revolutionary force. “The rationalizing of agriculture,” Marx writes in Capital: Volume III, “makes it for the first time capable of operating on a social scale,” But this is only possible after “first completely impoverishing the direct producers” by expropriating their land and resources.

Despite the violent expulsion of the peasantry from agricultural lands that often preceded capitalist agricultural development, Marx clearly saw increased agricultural labor productivity as a necessary step in his dialectical theory of history. The “freeing” of agricultural labor wreaks havoc on the social—and “metabolic”—relations of both rural and urban life, but it also makes possible “a higher form of society to combine this surplus-labor with a greater reduction of time devoted to material labor in general.”

What is clear is that Marx understood the shift from country to town as a precondition for the subsequent development of revolutionary forces. Urbanization, in Marx’s lifetime and prior, was often a violent process—as it remains to this day. And yet, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels celebrate the process. They write, “the bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”

Marx’s writing on the subject is both critical of capitalist commodity agricultural production and highly supportive of rationalist and scientific agricultural production. He argued vehemently against Malthus and Ricardo’s claims that agricultural productivity growth was impossible without increasing labor hours. Marx, rather, was deeply influenced by the German chemist and agronomist, Justus von Liebig, who argued that a rational and scientific engagement with soil nutrients would allow farmers to continuously plant on acreage without losing fertility over time.

Indeed, the best rebuttal to Foster and Saito’s appropriation of Marx’s brief observation about the fertility challenges that agricultural production faced as peasants moved off the land, moved to cities, and joined the industrial proletariat comes from Marx himself. “Fertility always implies an economic relation, a relation to the existing chemical and mechanical development of agriculture,” Marx observed. “Whether by chemical means…or mechanical means,” he continues, “the obstacles which made a soil of equal fertility actually less fertile can be eliminated.”

And indeed that is exactly what came to pass. Nineteen years after the first publication of Capital, Volume III, the German chemical company BASF commercialized the Haber-Bosch process which allowed for the mass production of synthetic fertilizer and resolved the metabolic problem that Marx had actually referred to. Marx would hardly have been surprised.

In Part III of this series, we’ll offer a very different reading of Marx: as modernization theorist. Were he alive today, he would almost certainly be an ecomodernist, not a degrowther, ecological economist, and perhaps not even a communist.

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In Part I of this series, we describe the conquest of the old materialist Left by the environmental movement in the post-war era. In Part II, we break down how the effort to transform Marx from modernization theorist to degrowther presaged broader center-left political debates about capitalism, biophysical limits to human aspirations, and the nature of social, political, and economic modernization. In Part III, we offer a very different reading of Marx. Were he alive today, he would almost certainly be an ecomodernist, not a degrowther, ecological economist, and perhaps not even a communist.

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Part 1: Reverse Watermelon Politics

It doesn’t take much trolling around the internet to discover that Greta Thunberg is a Marxist. The climate skeptic website Climate Discussion Nexus has called her “Karl Marx in pigtails.” Thunberg, the Imaginative Conservative tells us, “is showing her true colors. And the color is red, not green.” The Spectator’s James Delingpole insists that Thunberg has “gone full Marxist.”

Thunberg is not the only prominent Marxist in our midst. Tucker Carlson, in recent years has compared the “church of environmentalism” to Marxism and described the Green New Deal as the “Great Green Leap Forward.” Indeed, the claim that environmentalists are really “watermelons,” green on the outside but red on the inside, is an evergreen cliché dating back decades.

Right wing critics of environmentalism, however, are not the only ones insisting that green is really red. Today, a very vocal cohort of left wing environmentalists deploy Marx under banners like degrowth and ecosocialism in the name of saving the planet.

But both the critics of watermelon politics and its proponents have the colors exactly backwards. The problem with the ecoleft today is not that they are hiding their communism behind a veneer of environmentalism, but rather that they are hiding their environmentalism behind a veneer of communism— they are red on the outside and green on the inside. This reverse watermelon politics reliably confuses capitalism with modernity, materialism with consumerism, and bohemianism with proletarianism.

The result is a class politics in which egalitarian elites, in the academy, NGOs, philanthropy, and the knowledge economy, wage economic war against the working classes. The new ecoleft revolutionary class demands regressive taxes, restrictions on consumption, and food, energy, and transportation policies that raise the cost of living for those least able to afford it—all justified by Malthusian claims that absent such measures, human societies will cross biophysical “metabolic” thresholds, resulting in apocalyptic consequences for humanity.

The core demands of the ecoleft are typically dressed up with a fig leaf of redistributionist socialism. The regressive nature of the new austerity will be leavened by redistribution, they insist, assuring that it is the rich, not the poor, who pay. But the tell that it is the “eco” and not the “socialism” that is in control here is that there is no clear theory as to how the post-capitalist ecoeconomy will produce economic surplus to distribute, or redistribute, fairly. It should not surprise that the most identifiably socialist features of the original Green New Deal—Medicare for All and a national jobs guarantee—were largely forgotten within months of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’ election to Congress. By the time the Inflation Reduction Act passed years later, loudly trumpeted as a triumph of the activist Left, all that remained were green tax credits, with hardly a complaint from the erstwhile ecosocialists taking credit for its passage.

The old Marxist Left had a theory of the economy, how it produces surplus and value, and how both the quantity and quality of production changes as political economies evolve. The ecoleft has no such theory, insisting instead that less will be more and that new forms of connection, to each other and to nature, will make up for any material want. In place of a working theory of surplus value, the ecoleft offers little more than catastrophism and nostalgia for the feudal, pre-industrial past while proposing to impose ostensibly science-based ecological thresholds upon unwilling polities. Combining ivory tower nihilism with hostility towards the working class, reverse watermelon politics is both antithetical to anything that might be described as democratic socialism and disastrous for any prospect that the Left might succeed politically in the 21st century.

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The Rise of the Ecoleft

Attempts to reconcile the historical materialism of the old Marxist Left with the ecological demands of post-war environmentalism date to the very earliest days of the New Left. As the baby boom generation, raised amidst post-war abundance, flooded into American universities, environmental concerns increasingly challenged materialist politics and liberatory demands based on race, gender, and sexuality complicated older, universalist notions of class solidarity and consciousness.

Meanwhile, America’s post-war working class had become arguably the richest in human history. What was good for General Motors did appear, to most, to be good for the country. America’s industrial proletariat was moving to the suburbs and buying tract homes with government-guaranteed mortgages—hardly the stuff of revolution.

And so the foundational texts of the New Left, like the Port Huron Statement and Herbert Marcuse’s seminal, One Dimensional Man, embraced a radical, if mostly underappreciated shift with profound implications for the modern Left. Because industrial abundance and welfare state beneficence had rendered the working classes unreliable allies in the anti-capitalist project, students, not the industrial proletariat, would constitute the revolutionary class in the advanced democracies of the West.

In that shift lay the seeds of two related political transformations. Liberal and left wing parties, despite continuing to fashion themselves as voices for poor and working people, largely became tribunes of the educated classes across the advanced developed economies of the West. This first transformation then enabled the second: the incorporation of environmentalism fully into the politics of the Left. Once the Left had divorced itself from actual proletarian constituencies, whose interests it purported to advocate but whose concerns it dismissed as “false needs,” the path had been cleared for environmentalism to capture the gentrified revolutionary classes of the post-war Left.

Through the 1970’s and 80’s, organized labor and environmentalists struggled for the soul of liberal and left wing politics across the developed world. But by the 1990s it was clear that ecology would trump labor ideologically and politically, a development that would herald the abandonment of the Left by working class constituencies. For a political faction whose increasingly elite composition belied its egalitarian values, this last development was problematic. But the response was not to refashion the Left to reflect the changing interests of the working classes in advanced developed economies but rather to refashion Marx and the history of the Left in the image of the new ecoleftists. Much of that work, initially, played out in obscure academic journals. And while “who cares,” is, at one level, a not unreasonable reaction, the intellectual gymnastic and talmudic debates involved in the effort to reconcile Marx and ecology that played out on the far left flank of center left politics also reflects a deeper conceptual rift that has challenged both liberalism and the leftist political project in the advanced, late-capitalist economies of the West.

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In Part II of this series, we’ll break down the effort to transform Marx from modernization theorist to degrowther and how that effort touches broader center-left political debates about capitalism, biophysical limits to human aspirations, and the nature of social, political, and economic modernization.

For a few years now, I’ve sent out a regular update to Breakthrough’s nuclear supporters on the status of efforts to commercialize a new generation of advanced nuclear reactors. Since the start of the second Trump administration, the pace of change, for better or worse, has been head-spinning and not always easy to keep track of, much less make sense of. So I thought this would be a good time to share my take on what the administration’s evolving strategy appears to be and what it portends for the future of the nuclear sector in the United States with a wider audience. What follows is an edited version of my August update. Paid subscribers are welcome to provide reactions, feedback, and alternative takes in the comments.

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In my last update, in the spring, I observed that while there was enormous uncertainty about how the second Trump administration intended to proceed on nuclear, the one thing that seemed certain was that one way or another, the administration intended to break things:

When I speak of the uncertainty around the administration’s agenda, I mean that not just in the normal sense of uncertainty about what a new administration is going to try to do and how it is going to do it. This is a norm-breaking administration and I think that it is likely, for better or worse, to break a lot of long-standing norms around how nuclear is regulated, built, and financed. I say that with no foreknowledge of what that might entail. It’s just a hunch. But I don’t think I’m alone in that assessment and we should not be surprised if this administration goes way out of the box and attempts to break things in order to get nuclear built very quickly.

Almost everything that has transpired since I wrote those words has proven them prescient. In May, the administration issued a sweeping series of executive orders directing the NRC to revamp its entire regulatory code in the next 18 months, reevaluate its linear no-threshold radiological health model, and establish a numerical limit for low dose exposure to ionizing radiation. It has directed the Departments of Energy and Defense to make federal sites available for new reactors and invoked the Defense Production Act to designate data centers as critical infrastructure, allowing reactors approved by DOE and DOD to sell commercial power to those facilities.

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Later in May, the administration permitted a new uranium mine in Utah in two weeks. In June, President Trump removed a Democratic NRC commissioner, former chair Chris Hanson, from the commission while DOGE forced the resignation of a Republican commissioner and the agency’s executive director and senior deputies.

Then this month, the Department of Energy named 10 new reactor developers who will demonstrate their first reactors at a new pilot site at the Idaho National Laboratory, with several expected to have demonstrated reactors operating next year. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, has signed contracts with Radiant Energy, X-energy, and Oklo to deliver mass-manufactured reactors to military bases.

Like many of the administration’s initiatives, it’s not clear that all of this is legal. It is also not clear if that will matter. The clear imperative is to create new facts on the ground as quickly as possible—new reactors, mines, fuel fabrication facilities, and similar. Despite a lot of skepticism from many quarters, there is a decent chance they will succeed with some number of demonstrations or first of a kind micro-reactors deployed within the next few years.

There has been a lot of concern that the Trump Administration intended to eliminate the NRC entirely, or to reorganize it under the auspices of the Department of Energy. But that, for the moment at least, does not appear to be the plan. By law, commercial reactors must be licensed by a vote of no fewer than three NRC commissioners. Attempting to license commercial reactors without the commission would result in a legal nightmare, handing nuclear opponents a strong legal basis to challenge every new reactor license, or relicensing, across the country. The administration has just nominated a new commissioner, Ho Nieh, to the commission, lending further credence to the notion that it is not planning to get rid of the NRC entirely. Nieh was, until 2021, the director of the NRC’s Nuclear Reactor Regulation division, and was widely regarded as among the most committed senior leaders at the agency to regulatory modernization.

So there does appear to be some method to the madness. The administration’s approach will be to expedite licensing and deployment of new advanced reactors, primarily micro-reactors, by licensing them under the authorities of DOE and DOD and then deploying them initially at military bases, while very substantially revamping the NRC licensing and regulatory frameworks at the same time. Once these technologies are demonstrated, and the first reactors deployed at military installations, firms will apply to the NRC for commercial licenses under the new rules, allowing broader commercialization.

This appears to be the basis of the controversial statement attributed to the DOGE lead at the NRC that he expected the agency to “rubberstamp” reactor designs. Generously, this statement might be interpreted to mean that NRC will have data from operating reactors at military bases to evaluate, and a much simpler, downsized licensing framework that the agency will be using to expeditiously license reactors that have already been proven through initial military deployments. Less generously, the word means exactly what it means, and the Administration expects the agency to not look too hard at the safety or efficacy of new reactor technologies. The truth likely lies somewhere in between.

One lesson from this is just how much the imaginations of not only nuclear opponents, but also most mainstream proponents, were constrained by the legacy technologies, institutions, politics, and history. The effort to reboot the US nuclear sector was happening slowly and now all at once. We at Breakthrough have long argued that the federal government could drive rapid innovation and development of new nuclear technology. We even authored a report in 2019 arguing that early deployment of microreactors through federal procurement and advanced market commitments would be the fastest and cheapest public policy to get advanced nuclear technology commercialized and moving down a cost curve. But I’d be lying if I said that I saw the current effort coming.

That doesn’t mean that any of it will necessarily go well. As I noted in my last update, all the policy support in the world won’t matter if a new wave of nuclear developers can’t figure out how to deliver new technology on time and on budget and, in the case of small and micro-reactors, succeed in mass manufacturing reactors and achieving big productivity gains so they get cheap enough to compete in competitive energy markets. Notably, a number of the developers named by DOE to deploy microreactors at INL do not appear to have done even basic engineering of their proposed designs. It is not at all clear how some firms will manage to deploy actual reactors that achieve criticality in the next year, much less how they will do so safely.

There is also, without question, a fine line between right-sizing nuclear safety regulation and bypassing regulation and safety evaluation entirely. A wave of failures and accidents, even if they don’t result in significant releases of radiation, could hinder public and policy-maker support for nuclear energy. And there is significant risk that efforts to take a chainsaw to the NRC will create more regulatory uncertainty than it eliminates, at least in the short term.

But whether this administration gets any or all of it right, the current moment should establish that when political leaders get truly serious about nuclear energy, it is possible to go much faster than has historically been the case in the US and most other countries. As a result, and for better or worse, the business, economic, technological, and political landscape for nuclear energy is likely to look radically different in the coming years than it does today. What exactly it looks like, and whether the sector will be better able to meet America and the world’s energy needs than it is today is anyone’s guess.

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The following is an excerpt of my review of Here Comes The Sun written for The New Atlantis Journal. To read the entire review, click HERE.

Some years ago, my colleagues and I used to joke that after the revolution, all essays about climate change would be written by Bill McKibben. This was during the final years of the Obama administration and the first Trump administration, when McKibben was ubiquitous in the mainstream media. In every year between 2015 and 2021, he published at least two and up to as many as six articles in the New York Times. At the same time, he was writing a regular column at the New Yorker while also publishing in virtually every leading center-left publication in the country: the New Republic, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the Nation. No major legacy publication, it seemed, was exempt.

McKibben’s revolution, though, is looking tenuous these days. The tactics and rhetoric of the climate movement, and its outsized influence on the Democratic Party and the Biden administration, have sparked a terrible backlash, both among the public at large and within the Republican Party. In the face of rising energy and electricity prices, the Biden administration’s abandonment of “all of the above” energy policies, its seeming hostility to the production and use of America’s abundant oil and gas resources, and its willingness to kowtow to the climate movement helped doom Biden’s and then Harris’s election prospects.

The price of hitching the climate movement and the clean energy future wholly to Biden and the Democratic Party has also been steep. The Trump administration and the Republican Congress are not only in the process of laying waste to the Biden-era climate and energy agenda but have now turned the very same tools that environmentalists and Democrats long used to try to regulate fossil energy out of existence — NIMBYism, targeted taxes, permitting — against renewables, likely to far greater effect.

But at this dark moment for the climate movement, McKibben has good news. After decades of failed predictions, grand promises, and public subsidies, his new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, heralds the arrival of a solar energy revolution. Solar, in McKibben’s telling, is now the cheapest source of energy, clean or dirty, on the planet. And it will keep getting cheaper. Backed by the full might of Chinese mercantilism, nobody — not Exxon Mobil, Donald Trump, or the vast right-wing conspiracy — can stop it.

McKibben’s solar revolution has unfurled with startling rapidity. The last two years, he argues, have marked an epochal technoeconomic shift. And yet, despite a lot of solar deployment during that period, one would be hard-pressed to find much evidence of a shift in any of the key greenhouse-gas emissions metrics. The vast majority of global energy continues to be produced by fossil fuels, a fact that hasn’t much changed for decades. The Chinese “electro-state” that McKibben says represents the future doesn’t look appreciably different in this regard than the U.S. “petrostate” that he says is now trying to hold that future back. Both still depend on fossil fuels for about 80 percent of their energy consumption.

Across Here Comes the Sun’s narrative arc, what is apparent is that despite McKibben’s best efforts at optimism, the epochal shift over the last two years that actually animates the book is the return of Donald Trump. Here Comes the Sun is a rearguard action, not a victory march — an effort to sustain the climate politics that McKibben has played such a crucial role in constructing over the last generation at an existential moment for his movement.

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Arguably, McKibben’s omnipresence in the world of climate journalism has been well earned. His first book, The End of Nature, published in 1989, launched climate change into public consciousness. Since then, he has written prolifically on the topic.

But McKibben has also long since ceased to be a journalist in any recognizable sense of the term. Since the early 2000s, he has held various positions, currently an endowed chair, at Middlebury College, from whence he launched the modern climate movement — including 350. org, a grassroots advocacy operation with a $20 million annual budget; campaigns against the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines; a global fossil-fuel divestment movement; and much else.

When he writes for publications like the Times, McKibben sounds like a journalist. His prose is peppered with colorful subjects and fascinating back stories. His essays overflow with citations of academic publications, news stories, and well-­credentialed experts. He is a master of the medium: modest, self-­deprecating, folksy, unfailingly polite and reasonable, part Sunday school teacher and part science educator.

But he is always also, as they say on Wall Street, talking his own book. Because he is so deeply and centrally involved in shaping the strategy, tactics, and messaging of the climate movement, when McKibben reports on climate change, he is essentially covering himself.

Consider his October 2023 New Yorker column on the Biden administration’s pending decision on whether to permit new natural gas export facilities. Titled “A Smoking Gun for Biden’s Big Climate Decision?,” the essay breathlessly related the latest study by Cornell University professor Robert Howarth, which found that because of methane leakage, liquefied natural gas exports are worse for the climate than coal, despite the fact that natural gas emits half as much carbon dioxide. What McKibben didn’t tell his readers, across some 2,000 words, was that Howarth had released the study, which had yet to be peer-reviewed, at McKibben’s request, to provide him with ammunition to sway the Biden administration in his campaign to block the facilities.

What has made McKibben so influential in recent years is his unprecedented combination of roles: as movement prophet, ecovisionary, and preeminent mainstream chronicler of the “climate crisis.” But it also makes him a quintessentially unreliable narrator…

Read the full review at The New Atlantis.

Recently, in an exchange on X, my former colleague Tyler Norris observed that over the years, my views about climate risk have evolved substantially. Norris posted a screenshot of a page from the book Break Through, where Michael Shellenberger and I argued that if the world kept burning fossil fuels at current rates, catastrophe was virtually assured:

Over the next 50 years, if we continue to burn as much coal and oil as we’ve been burning, the heating of the earth will cause the sea levels to rise and the Amazon to collapse, and, according to scenarios commissioned by the Pentagon, will trigger a series of wars over the basic resources like food and water.

Norris is right. I no longer believe this hyperbole. Yes, the world will continue to warm as long as we keep burning fossil fuels. And sea levels will rise. About 9 inches over the last century, perhaps another 2 or 3 feet over the course of the rest of this century. But the rest of it? Not so much.

There is little reason to think that the Amazon is at risk of collapsing over the next 50 years. Agricultural yield and output will almost certainly continue to rise, if not necessarily at the same rate as it has over the last 50 years. There has been no observable increase in meteorological drought globally that might trigger the resource wars that the Pentagon was scenario planning back then.

At the time that we published Break Through, I, along with most climate scientists and advocates, believed that business as usual emissions would lead to around five degrees of warming by the end of this century. As Zeke Hausfather, Glen Peters, Roger Pielke Jr, and Justin Richie have demonstrated over the last decade or so, that assumption was never plausible.

There have been some revisionist claims that the reason for the downgrading of business as usual warming assumptions is due to the success of climate and clean energy policies over the last several decades. But five degrees of warming by the end of this century was no more plausible in 2007, when Break Through was published, than it is today. The class of scenarios upon which it was based assumed very high population growth, very high economic growth, and slow technological change. None of these trends individually track at all with actual long term global trends. Fertility rates have been falling, global economic growth slowing, and the global economy decarbonizing for decades.

Nor is there good reason to think that the combination of these three trends could possibly be sustained in concert. High economic growth is strongly associated with falling fertility rates. Technological change is the primary driver of long term economic growth. A future with low rates of technological change is not one that is consistent with high economic growth. And a future characterized by high rates of economic growth is not one that is consistent with high rates of population growth.

As a result of these dynamics, most estimates of worst case warming by the end of the century now suggest 3 degrees or less. But as consensus around these estimates has shifted, the reaction to this good news among much of the climate science and advocacy community has not been to become less catastrophic. Rather, it has been to simply shift the locus of catastrophe from five to three degrees of warming. Climate advocates have arguably become more catastrophic about climate change in recent years, not less.

This is all the more confounding given that the good news extends well beyond projections of long term warming. Despite close to a degree and a half of warming over the last century or so, global mortality from climate and weather extremes has fallen by a factor of 25 or more on a per capita basis. As Pielke documented recently, the world is on track this year for what is almost certainly the lowest level of climate related mortality in recorded human history, not only on a per capita basis but on an absolute basis as well. The economic costs of climate extremes continue to rise, but this is almost entirely due to affluence, population growth, and the migration of global populations towards climate hazards, mainly cities that tend to be located in coastal regions and flood plains.

So I think the far more interesting question that Norris raises, at least implicitly, is not why my colleagues and I at Breakthrough have revised our priors about climate risk but why so many progressive environmentalists like Norris have not.

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When Is Weather Climate Change?

For me, the cognitive dissonance began as I became familiar with Roger Pielke Jr’s work on normalized hurricane losses, in the late 2000s. This was around the time that a lot of messaging from the climate advocacy community had started to focus on extreme weather events, not just as harbingers for the storms of our grandchildren, to borrow the title of James Hansen’s 2009 book, but as being fueled by climate change in the present.

Hansen himself had been under no such illusion, writing that “local climate change remains small compared with day-to-day weather fluctuations.” But by this point, the advocacy community had figured out that framing climate change as a future risk would not prove sufficient politically to transform the US and global energy systems in the way that most believed necessary. This became a particularly urgent concern for the movement after the failure of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade legislation in 2010. And so the movement set about attempting to move the locus of climate catastrophe from the future to the present.

If you want to know why Pielke has been so demonized over the last 15 years by climate activists and activist climate scientists, it’s because he got in the way of this new narrative. Pielke’s work, going back to the mid-1990s showed, again and again, that the normalized economic costs of climate related disasters weren’t increasing, despite the documented warming of the climate. And unlike a lot of researchers who sometimes produce studies that cut against the climate movement’s chosen narratives, he wasn’t willing to be quiet about it. Pielke got in the way of the advocacy community at the moment that it was determined to argue that present day disasters were driven by climate change and got run over.

But the cognitive dissonance for me went well beyond that. It wasn’t just that Pielke had produced strong evidence that undermined a key claim of the climate advocacy community. It wasn’t even witnessing Pielke’s cancellation, which was brutal. It came, rather, as I came to understand why you couldn’t find a climate change signal in the disaster loss data, despite close to a degree and a half of warming over the last century or so.

That comes down to two linked factors that determine how climate becomes weather and, in turn, how weather contributes to climate related natural disasters. Taking the second of these first, climate related natural disasters are not simply the result of bad weather. They happen at the intersection of weather and human societies. What determines the cost of a climate related disaster, in both human and economic terms, is not just how extreme the weather is. It is also how many people and how much wealth is affected by the extreme weather event and how vulnerable they are to that event. Over the same period that the climate has warmed by 1.5 degrees, the global population has more than quadrupled, per capita income has increased by a factor of ten, and the scale of infrastructure, social services, and technology that protect people and wealth from climate extremes has expanded massively. These latter factors simply overwhelm the climate signal.

But it's not just that these other factors—exposure and vulnerability to climate hazards—are such huge factors in determining the costs of climate related disasters. Hence, the second problem with claims that climate change causes natural disasters is that anthropogenic climate change is simply a much smaller factor at the local and regional scale than natural climate variability. There is nothing in the climate science literature that has changed this basic fact since Hansen made the same observation over 15 years ago.

Over the last several years, some climate scientists, including Hausfather and Hansen, have pointed to anomalously high surface and ocean temperatures as evidence that warming may be accelerating, perhaps even faster than model ensembles have suggested. But even in the case where climate sensitivity proves to be relatively high, additional anthropogenic warming is an order of magnitude less than the oscillations of natural variability.

This basic physical reality can get lost in the enormous climate impacts literature, with its confusing terminology and findings around concepts like attribution and detection. Arguments about whether anthropogenic climate change has had any impact on extreme events of various sorts quickly get mixed up with arguments about whether climate change is a major factor, much less the major factor in extreme events.

Consider this twitter debate last year about the effects of climate change on tropical cyclones generally and Hurricane Helene specifically, featuring a number of former Breakthrough Institute staff and senior fellows, including Norris, Jesse Jenkins, Hausfather, and Pielke. In the back and forth, Hausfather cites a study concluding that climate change had resulted in a 10% increase in rainfall associated with hurricanes and tropical storms during the 2020 North Atlantic hurricane season. Norris cites an outlier study from Lawrence Berkeley researchers estimating that climate change could have increased rainfall in parts of Georgia and North Carolina by as much as 50%. Jenkins links to a NOAA factsheet summarizing a range of data and modeling on evidence for intensification of tropical cyclones globally and in various regional basins and argues that IPCC assessments of the role that climate change is playing in disasters like Helene are outdated. Pielke and others point back to IPCC and other broader literature assessments which conclude that there is weak evidence for detection and attribution of increased tropical cyclone frequency or intensity due to climate change to date.

Depending on how much weight one gives to individual studies and models, versus broader literature reviews and scientific assessments, you can find some evidence for some intensification of some features of tropical cyclone behavior and frequency in some places. But what you won’t find, Norris’ reference to a single unpublished and unpeer-reviewed study notwithstanding, is good evidence that climate change has affected those things very much.

The absence of an anthropogenic climate signal in most climate and weather phenomena is not paradoxical. It is simply not possible given the amount of anthropogenic warming the planet has experienced. When scientists, journalists, and activists say that climate change made a given extreme event far more likely, what they are actually saying is that an event that is somewhat more intense than it would have been absent climate change could have been made so by climate change. To take the simplest example, a heatwave that is 1.5 degrees warmer than it would have been without climate change was made vastly more likely to occur due to climate change. The claim is tautological.

Put these two factors together—the outsized influence that exposure and vulnerability have on the cost of extreme climate and weather phenomena, and the very modest intensification that climate change contributes to these events, when it plays any role at all—and what should be clear is that climate change is contributing very little to present day disasters. It is a relatively small factor in the frequency and intensity of climate hazards that are experienced by human societies, which in turn play a small role in the human and economic costs of climate related disasters compared to non-climate factors.

This also means that the scale of anthropogenic climate change that would be necessary to very dramatically intensify those hazards, such that they overwhelm the non-climate factors in determining the consequences of future climate related events, is implausibly large. The amount of warming that is conceivable even in plausible worst case scenarios, in other words, is not remotely consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes that I once believed in, where tens or hundreds of million, perhaps even billions of lives were at stake.

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A Sting in the Tail?

For a long time, even after I had come to terms with the fundamental disconnect between what climate advocates were saying about extreme events and the role that climate change could conceivably be playing, I held on to the possibility of catastrophic climate futures based upon uncertainty. The sting, as they say, is in the tail, meaning so-called fat tails in the climate risk distribution. These are tipping points or similar low probability, high consequence scenarios that aren’t factored into central estimates. The ice sheets could collapse much faster than we understand or the gulf stream might shut down, bringing frigid temperatures to western Europe, or permafrost and methane hydrates frozen in the sea floor might rapidly melt, accelerating warming.

These and many other so-called tipping points commonly invoked as reason for precaution are the known unknowns of climate risk—specific phenomena that we know might happen without being able to specify very precisely their probability and magnitude, the timeframe over which they might occur, or the threshold of warming and other factors that might trigger them.

But like the supposed collapse of the Amazon, once you look more closely at these risks they don’t add up to catastrophic outcomes for humanity. While sensationalist news stories frequently refer to the collapse of the gulf stream, what they are really referring to is the slowing of the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Circulation (AMOC). AMOC helps transport warm water to the North Atlantic and moderates winter temperatures across western Europe. But its collapse, much less its slowing, would not result in a hard freeze across all of Europe. Indeed, under plausible conditions in which it might significantly slow, it would act as a negative feedback, counterbalancing warming, which is happening faster across the European continent than almost any place else in the world.

Permafrost and methane hydrate thawing, meanwhile, are slow processes not fast ones. Even irreversible melting would occur over millennial timescales, fast in geological terms but very slow in human terms. The same is true of accelerated melting of ice caps. Even under very high warming scenarios, broadly acknowledged today as improbable, the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets contribute around a meter of sea level rise by the end of this century. Those processes would continue far into the future. But even very accelerated scenarios for rapid disintegration of ice sheets unfold over many centuries, not decades.

Moreover, the problem with grounding strong precautionary claims in these known unknowns is that doing so demands strong remedies in the present in response to future risks that are both unquantifiable and unfalsifiable, a problem made even worse by the fact that “fat tail” proponents generally then proceed to ignore the fact that the unknown, unquantifiable, and unfalsifiable risks they are referring to are incredibly low probability and instead set about centering them in the climate discourse.

I recently took issue with Varun Sivaram’s misuse of the concept in his recent “Climate Realism” project at the Council on Foreign Relations. And a follow up conversation he had with Dan Raimi on the Resources for the Future podcast is illustrative of the problem.

Sivaram: I think it is terribly wishful thinking to think that climate change poses a manageable risk… and that the climate scientists have got it all wrong… I do believe, however, that the tail risks, the greater-than-5-percent-chance risks, are so material that they signal the end of society as we know it in the United States…

Raimi: That argument is very consistent with Martin Weitzman’s famous arguments about tail risks in the economic community, which I think have been very well understood but not necessarily applied in the policy context. You’re making this really clear argument that those tail risks need to be more central in our planning and in our thinking about the future.

Sivaram, here, is quite blatantly conflating tail risks, which are definitionally below 5% risks, with central risks. This has nothing to do with climate scientists getting the basics of climate change wrong and everything to do with Sivaram getting statistical risk wrong. Raimi, a long-time fellow at what is arguably the premier energy resources and economics think tank in the United States just goes along with it, attributing this notion to Martin Weitzman and suggesting that tail risks are well understood in the economics community.

To the contrary, Weitzman’s entire point was literally the opposite, that outsized risks in the tail of the climate risk distribution were poorly understood and might not exist at all. Other than price a bit more risk into the central estimates, Weitzman was explicit that there wasn’t actually anything to be done about the problem. And remember, what Sivaram is arguing must be done in response to these misplaced tail risks is to bring the full weight of American soft and hard power to bear on poor countries around the world to prevent them from developing their economies with fossil fuels, even as he concedes that the United States is unlikely to quickly move away from them.

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Clean Energy Without Catastrophism

As with Norris and Jenkins, I’ve known Sivaram and Raimi for a long time. I agree with them on many subjects: on the value of clean energy and public support for energy technology innovation, the need for the global poor to have much greater access to energy, and the damage both psychic and political that doomism does to efforts to shift the world toward greener energy. They are all well intentioned.

And yet, all make representations about climate science and climate risk that are dubious, if not false. And my question is why? Why do so many smart people, most trained as scientists, engineers, lawyers, or public policy experts, and all who will tell you, and I say this not ironically, that they “believe in science,” get the science of climate risk so badly wrong?

There are, in my view, several reasons. The first is that highly educated people with high levels of science literacy are no less likely to get basic scientific issues wrong than anyone else when the facts conflict with their social identities and ideological commitments. Yale Law Professor Dan Kahan has shown that people who are highly concerned about climate change actually have less accurate views about climate change overall than climate skeptics and that this remains true even among partisans with high levels of education and general science literacy. Elsewhere, Kahan and others have demonstrated that on many issues, highly educated people are often more likely to stubbornly hold onto erroneous beliefs because they are more expert at defending their political views and ideological commitments.

The second reason is that there are strong social, political, and professional incentives if you make a living doing left of center climate and energy policy to get climate risk wrong. The capture of Democratic and progressive politics by environmentalism over the last generation has been close to total. There is little tolerance on the Left for any expression of materialist politics that challenge foundational claims of the environmental movement. Meanwhile the climate movement has effectively conflated consensus science about the reality and anthropogenic origins of climate change with catastrophist claims about climate risk for which there is no consensus whatsoever.

Whether you are an academic researcher, a think tank policy wonk, a program officer at an environmental or liberal philanthropy, or a Democratic Congressional staffer, there is simply no benefit and plenty of downside to questioning, much less challenging, the central notion that climate change is an existential threat to the human future. It’s a good way to lose friends or even your job. It won’t help you get your next job or your next grant. And so everyone, mostly falls in line. Better to go along to get along.

Finally, there is a widespread belief that one can’t make a strong case for clean energy and technological innovation absent the catastrophic specter of climate change. “Why bother with nuclear power or clean energy if climate change is not a catastrophic risk,” is a frequent response. And this view simply ignores the entire history of modern energy innovation. Over the last two centuries, the world has moved inexorably from dirtier and more carbon intensive technologies to cleaner ones. Burning coal, despite its significant environmental impacts, is cleaner than burning wood and dung. Burning gas is cleaner than coal. And obviously producing energy with wind, solar, and nuclear is cleaner than doing so with fossil fuels.

There is a view among most climate and clean energy advocates that the risk of climate change both demands and is necessary to justify a much faster transition toward cleaner energy technologies. But as a practical matter, there is no evidence whatsoever that 35 years of increasingly dire rhetoric and claims about climate change have had any impact on the rate at which the global energy system has decarbonized and by some measure, the world decarbonized faster over the 35 years prior to climate change emerging as a global concern than it did in the 35 years since.

This argument ultimately becomes circular. It’s not that there is no reason to support cleaner energy absent fear of catastrophic climate change. It’s that there is no reason to support a rapid transformation of the global energy economy at the speed and scale necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change if the specter of catastrophic climate change is not looming. Which is arguably true but is also a proposition that depends upon not asking particularly hard questions about the nature of climate risk.

Despite some tonal, tactical, and strategic differences, this basic view of climate risk, and corresponding demand for a rapid transformation of the global energy economy is broadly shared by the climate activists and the pragmatists. The impulse is millenarian, not meliorist. Underneath the real politik, technocratic wonkery, and appeals to scientific authority is a desire to remake the world.

For all its worldly and learned affect, what that has resulted in is the creation of an insular climate discourse on the Left that may be cleverer by half than right wing dismissals of climate change but is no less prone to making misleading claims about the subject, ignoring countervailing evidence, and demonizing dissent. And it has produced a politics that is simultaneously grandiose and maximalist and, increasingly, deeply out of touch with popular sentiment.

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Ten years ago, the Breakthrough Institute published the Ecomodernist Manifesto, co-authored by 18 researchers, theorists, and advocates, with the goal of inspiring what they called, “A good anthropocene.” The authors aimed to create an ecological alternative to environmentalism and correct the view that humanity must “harmonize with nature to avoid economic and ecological collapse.”

Since the publication of the Ecomodernist Manifesto, the Breakthrough Institute has been the central hub around which the ecomodernist community has evolved, intellectually and institutionally. We hosted more than a decade of Breakthrough Dialogues where we convened fellow travelers, alongside many of our loudest critics, to explore the possibilities, realities, and limitations of ecomodernism. And we’ve worked assiduously to make ecomodernism live in the world, through our advocacy of nuclear energy, large-scale, technological agriculture, and material and energy abundance.

The Breakthrough Journal played an important role in all of those efforts, as an outlet for long form writing and journalism that explored the tensions and contradictions that have increasingly rendered contemporary environmentalism toothless, tendentious, mendacious, and malthusian in roughly equal measure. And as a place where heterodox authors could offer new ways of thinking about ecological politics, global modernization, and what it would mean for both humans and nature to thrive.

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Early issues of the Breakthrough Journal launched the heated debates over so-called New Conservation, which sought to reconcile land use and biodiversity conservation practice with human development, ultimately giving way to decoupling for conservation and ecomodernism, EO Wilson’s Half-Earth Project, and a new appreciation for lands-sparing and industrial agriculture. The Journal likewise sparked debates over what we at Breakthrough called “The Good Anthropocene” and the possibility of positive futures for both humans and nature. It was in the pages of the Journal that Emma Marris, Margot Finn, Rachel Laudan, Jennifer Bernstein, and others published a new kind of eco-foodie journalism, arguing that slow and local food were luxury pursuits, not vectors for economic justice.

Definitive essays punctuated the Journal’s publication: Nils Gilman on the fascist undercurrents of the climate apocalypse; Mark Sagoff on environmentalism’s fundamental narcissism; Steve Rayner and Dan Sarewitz on environmental science’s tendency to allow myths and models to eclipse reality and empiricism; Chris Foreman on the cynicism of environmental justice. And of course the Journal also featured a seminal essay from the famed philosopher Bruno Latour, who offered a rereading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein urging societies to cherish our technological monsters. Throughout its run, the Journal was the exclusive venue constructing a non-catastrophist environmental politics, featuring work on earth-making, novel ecosystems, rewilding, de-extinction, geoengineering, and other meliorist monsters taboo elsewhere in environmental discourse.

Ten years on, the ecomodernist project is far less tenuous than it was. Whether proselytized under the banner of ecomodernism, climate pragmatism, or abundance, ecomodernist commitments to decoupling, innovation, and building a prosperous, materially abundant, and technologically advanced future are far more explicit and legible in ecological discourse and politics than they were a decade ago.

That shift, in turn, demands a different kind of outlet. Ecomodernism is now both much bigger than the Breakthrough Institute and more confident in its convictions. We will always endeavor to remain epistemically open, to question our own assumptions, and avoid descending into the empty slogans and comfortable verities that characterize so much present day discourse. But where the Breakthrough Journal was about challenging and deconstructing the old environmental paradigm, our new publication, The Ecomodernist, will be more about building the new one.

That paradigm sees the Earth as an open system, not a closed one. It rejects climate catastrophism and embraces environmental meliorism. It posits that the choices that humans face are not between ecological collapse or green transformation. They are rather more prosaic choices, between more or less hospitable environments and more or less biodiversity. Ecomodernism sees humans as earthmakers, not nature destroyers. The choices we face, not all at once but everywhere all the time, are about what sorts of natures we wish to preserve, or to create.

In these matters, our technological powers give us more and better choices. And our modernity gives us knowledge and self-awareness. But neither gives us wisdom. That, we firmly believed, can only be forged through discourse, debate, and democracy. The Ecomodernist is the banner under which, henceforth, we will make our contributions to all three.

As The Ecomodernist we will continue to publish regular analyses and essays on environmental politics, agriculture, nuclear energy, critical minerals, biotechnology, and much more.

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A few things will be different though.

First, we are opening up paid subscriptions for our subscribers and followers to support our work and join the ecomodernist community. While we remain committed to keeping our analyses and writing free to all, paid subscribers will be able to comment on our pieces and continue the conversation with our editorial staff and analysts. We see this as an opportunity to build an active community of ecomodernists that goes beyond IRL networks. The proceeds from our substack will go directly to improving our publication.

Second, we will be expanding who contributes to The Ecomodernist. Breakthrough Institute staff and leadership will remain primary authors, but we will also publish external authors and thinkers who can advance ecomodernism through both agreement and disagreement.

We at the Breakthrough Institute believe that nothing is timeless. Some institutions and organizations must die to be reborn. The end of the Breakthrough Journal does not signal the end of its usefulness. More than a decade of thinking and writing will remain available on thebreakthrough.org, where many of the pieces from the last year, and all the way back to 2011, can still inform new political movements and post-environmental thought.

Please join as we launch The Ecomodernist.